


A Jump To The Left

by Owlship



Category: Back to the Future (Movies), Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: (because the organic mechanic), Alternate Universe - Fusion, Culture Shock, Developing Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Medical Trauma/Hospital Phobia, Mostly Fluff, Slice of Life, Time Travel, eventually furiosa is going to have nice things like ice cream & flannel jammies i promise, i just have to be mean to her a little bit first
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-30 06:22:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5153516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlship/pseuds/Owlship
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." - L.P. Hartely</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the "time travel" square on my [trope_bingo card](http://v8roadworrier.dreamwidth.org) and also Back to the Future day! Alas, this is too late for both of those events because I don't have a time machine of my own.
> 
> Title from The Rocky Horror Picture Show's "Time Warp" because _of course_.

Returning to consciousness for good takes time. She drifts in and out of a dream, feverish visions of white fields and her deceased foremothers swirling across her mind, disconnected from the waking world.

Furiosa doesn't clearly remember much that happened after the lift ascended and she was whisked off to recover from her near-fatal stabbing. She knows that infection had set in, swift and merciless, and all the many compounds left by the Organic Mechanic combined with all of the remaining Vuvalini's knowledge wasn't enough to combat it. She dimly remembers, in between visions of fire and blood and death, that eventually the Fool had used what few words he could muster and begged them to let him take her someplace.

When she does finally wake, eyes unclouded by fever for the first time in what feels like days, all her limbs are strapped to a metal bed in a blindingly white room. There's a cannula running into her veins, some sort of wiretech devices beeping shrilly behind her, strange fabric rustling as she struggles against creaking leather manacles wrapped around her limbs. The Fool is off to her side mumbling nonsense about infection and medicine and staying calm, as if she has any room for calmness.

“It's safe here,” he says with a remarkable amount of conviction, hands resting on the metal rail near her chained-down hand. “No one's hurting you.”

Furiosa wants to bare her teeth in response, wants to scream in pain and rage and fear. She's pinned helpless like something out of her worst memories, tubes and wires protruding from her battered flesh, fighting the unrelenting grip of the cuffs and a heavy fog of drugs. The Fool doesn't reach out to touch her but hovers, a steady presence she's not sure should be trusted, still speaking halting words meant to calm her.

She only subsides struggling when it becomes clear that she's far too weak to break free, breaths coming in harsh painful pants, settles for steely silence while she gathers what strength she can. The shrill beeping increases in tempo, an alarm of some sort maybe, the pitch of it piercing through her skull.

A door set into the wall opens, disgorging a group of strangers, calm and unhurried. The Fool looks away from her to acknowledge them, then turns back to speak a few more words. “They're healers,” he says, “Medics. Here to help.”

They're a strange looking group dressed in matching tunics, brightly-colored and fine, tools tucked into drawers across the room rather than carried on their person. One wearing a long white robe over his clothing, a sharper color than even the Wives in their Vault had worn, introduces himself as Doctor Sampson. By the proprietary way he conducts the exam she assumes he's the one of highest rank, and keeps the closest eye on him.

They leave her shackled to the bed while they work, the Fool pushed aside until he's just in her periphery, mumbling a steady stream of nonsense words she thinks is meant to reassure her. Furiosa can't control the way her body flinches and shudders at the touch of cool gloved hands, sucks in high wheezing breaths when they ruck up the strange thin dress she's clad in to reveal the bandaged spots low on her ribs.

The Doctor uses a lot of long, unfamiliar words when speaking, and even if her mind wasn't still exhausted from it all Furiosa doubts she would be able to follow much of his meaning, though the Fool nods his head along as if he's taking it all in. Her chest feels like it's healing from the stabbing, which is the part she's focusing on, and when she cranes her neck she can see that the tracery of blood-poisoning emanating from the gashes has disappeared.

Whatever else was going on here she was indeed healing, and the promise of renewed strength is one of the only things that lets Furiosa throttle down the instinctive panic she feels.

The Fool says something in quiet words to one of the lesser-ranked medics once the Doctor has left, gestures vaguely to where she lies trapped on the cot. The woman he'd spoken to steps close, tunic decorated in shocking yellow and drawings of what might be some sort of animal.

“You're lucid now, so I'm going to undo the restraints,” she says, hands deftly unbuckling the manacles. “Promise you won't take any more swings at us?” The woman winks as she undoes the last of the strapping, face suggesting it's a sort of joke. As if it was _amusing_ that Furiosa would try to protect herself as best she could when all but defenseless in the hands of those who could mend or break bodies on a whim.

“Leave those sensors alone, now,” she continues, tapping one of the places where wires attach to Furiosa's skin. “They might get itchy, but they're important so we can keep track of your heart. After an injury like yours we don't like to take chances!”

Furiosa says nothing in reply, but when the healer steps back she turns her head to look at where the wires lead to. The bundle runs into a hulking device with some sort of moving display, showing lines that rise and fall in time with the beeps. It matches with the throb of her pulse, skittering faster before smoothing out as some of the desperate first rush of panic leaves her. What an inventive way to keep someone prisoner.

She waits, stock-still, until all the last healer has left the room before curling into herself as much as she's currently able, propping herself up so she's no longer flat on her back. Her sides throb underneath a blanket of numbness as she moves, some drug that lies heavy across her. Painkillers were rare in the Citadel, useful mostly for the pampered Wives and those Imperators who needed to function just enough to make their deaths worthy of being Witnessed. The Organic- the best-stocked medic she's ever encountered- didn't share them out lightly, and she reckons that she's under a heavy dose now. It frightens her, in an abstract way, the amount of debt she must be racking up.

There's something sinister about the clean lines of the room, the terrible straightness of the walls and grid-patterned ceiling. Everything is awash in a harshly astringent smell, covering up whatever else she might have picked up on, the electric lights overly-bright overhead. An unseen ventilator kicks on, cold air moving through grating high on the wall, the sort of extravagance she's come to expect from Warlords.

The Doctor had called her Miss Jobassa, her mother's name clashing with the honorific. She wonders if the Fool had thought there was danger to them knowing her own name, or if perhaps these healers had once known her mother and been in her debt, if it was in her name she was being treated so richly.

The Fool takes a seat in a plastic chair off to her right, and as he does she realizes that he's as strangely dressed as the healers had been. There's a jacket of some heavy material slung over the back of the chair but he's no longer in his leathers, pack and vest gone entirely. He might have bartered them away for her care- except the fabric he's now dressed in is much finer, in better shape than anything she's seen before. It's another detail that just doesn't make sense.

“What is this place?” she asks, voice rough from days without speaking. Or days spent screaming; she can't remember either way.

“A hospital,” he replies, eyes darting around to avoid her gaze. A lie, or something near it- there _was_ healing going on here, as her knitting flesh attested, but it was like no hospital she'd ever been to, much less heard of. She stares him down steadily until he hunches in on himself, like a scolded Pup.

“It's far away,” he says, “Very far.”

It's a non-answer that tells her nothing, and she intends to pry more out of him but is interrupted by a loud jarring noise ringing out. Some sort of music from a hidden speaker, and it must be an alarm of some sort because the Fool jolts, rummages for what she assumes is a weapon.

She reaches out blindly for a weapon of her own, finds that everything within reach of her hand is either bolted down or too heavy to wield, as weak as she is. Will her legs hold her, Furiosa wonders, eyeing the distance to the storage drawers set on the other side of the room, and how long after she removes the wiretech will its alarm sound? The noise cuts off as abruptly as it began, and she jerks her head back away from watching the still-closed door when the Fool starts talking.

“Still here,” he says, not looking in her direction at all now. There's a small black object in his hand, held pressed up against his face, and he seems to be- talking to it? “Mhm, just woke up,” he says with a nod of his head.

Furiosa knows that there used to be devices capable of communicating across vast distances but she's certainly never seen any, can't imagine how the Fool might have gotten his hands on one that actually functions. He stands from the chair, mumbling something with a few of the same words that the Doctor had used, and paces down the length of the room. There's a long pause before he continues, too far away for her to make out what he's saying beyond the low rumbling of his voice.

Nothing about this makes any sense, and if it wasn't for the sharp clarity of it all despite the drugs she can feel in her veins, she would think she's still trapped in some fever-dream.

The Fool turns back to her after one last exchange, perhaps with only the figments of his imagination. He blinks in surprise, as if not expecting to see her braced for a fight, before tucking the object back into his pocket and returning back to stand near the cot.

“Furiosa,” he says, and then seems to stall out, licks his lips nervously. “At nightfall I'll have to leave,” he says. “Rules. Will you be, um, alright?”

Does she have a choice? She's in a very strange and potentially hostile place, weak enough that just this short period of awareness has her feeling wrung-out, fettered still by a device hooked to her very heart, and stripped of all her belongings. If she was well she could use the treasure trove of items left behind by the healers to fight her way out if need be, but their confidence seems well-earned, if the electric lights burning while the sun shines and functional wiretech are anything to go by.

“How far are we from the Citadel?” she counters, wondering if they could reach the familiarity and relative safety of the spires swiftly enough should she demand they escape. It would be a shame to make enemies of a place as well-stocked as this, but she has no desire to stay a second longer than she needs to.

Furiosa touches the worse of the stab wounds gingerly, feeling for the hotness of infection through gauze and the strange thin dress they've given her. The pressure sends a sharp flare of pain through her flesh, but it feels as if it's healing well- and has been for several days, she would guess. Certainly healed enough for her to make the trip back, however long it was, once the haze of painkillers has left her.

The Fool cuts his gaze away from her hand, still pierced by the IV line she hasn't yet ripped out, and swallows heavily. He takes a deep breath, and brings his eyes up to meet with hers. “Far,” he says, “Many days away. It's safe, but... far.”

He's lying again, for reasons she can't figure out. If this place was more than a day's travel, maybe two, she surely would have died before reaching it. Her head throbs trying to make sense of the contradictory information, concentration sliding away now that there doesn't seem to be an immediate threat to guard against.

“Ah, tomorrow we can leave,” he says, guessing at her intentions. Unlike his previous statements it doesn't ring false, and she allows it to serve as a comfort. It's strange to be in this position, but- she finds herself wanting to trust him, having seen him already prove himself to be on her side.

“You should rest. Save your strength.”

Furiosa hates that there's sense to the suggestion, that her body is even now crying out for a return to sleep, the fogginess of medication and even the short period awake weighing heavily on her. There must be some reason he's delaying until tomorrow, why he won't give her a direct answer to her questions, but she's not in a position to force the issue while she's still mired deep under the effects of the painkillers.

Reluctantly she lowers herself back down to the mattress, feeling horrifically vulnerable as she does so. The infection might be beaten back but she is still weak, far too weak. The Fool said he'd have to leave at nightfall, which means if she wants to have any chance at rest she'll have to do so now, while she still has an ally by her side.

“Keep watch,” she says, though she doubts the Fool would lower his guard anyway, for all that he seems relatively at ease in this place.

Furiosa draws the thin blanket up over herself, to ward off the chill in the air and to provide the illusion of being more protected than she is. He makes a wordless noise in reply, hands reaching out to fuss with the edges of fabric hanging from the cot before retreating back to his chair.

Under the cover of the blanket she works out the cannula from her veins, a flash of blood rising against her skin, and knots the end of the tube so it doesn't drain into the mattress. They'll find it when they check her over next she knows, but if it's where the source of drug-heavy weariness she feels comes from then she wants no part of it.

Even as tired as she is from healing, Furiosa doesn't expect to fall truly asleep. The mattress on the cot is strange and soft, there are noises echoing through the walls, alarms and crackling voices speaking in codes she doesn't know. So it's a surprise when she blinks awake some time later, sunlight no longer slanting in through the window.

“Come now Mr. Rockatansky, visiting hours are over,” the yellow-tunic healer says from the open doorway. It's enough to jolt Furiosa out of the last shreds of sleep, and she sits upright to take stock quickly. The IV's fluid was clearly the source of her former drowsiness as without it she's sharp, pain gnawing at her ribcage like an animal. It hurts, but pain is an old friend to her- she would rather have the pain than a clouded mind.

“A moment?” the Fool asks, directed over her head to the healer, and the woman nods with a small smile.

“Five more minutes, and then they'll be doing evening rounds,” she says with an air of sharing a secret.

He looks startled, swings his eyes over to meet Furiosa's before returning to the healer. “I should stay for that,” he says, something protective in his voice, and Furiosa wonders with a curl of dread what their rounds entail, if they have him worried.

The medic shakes her head, “I'm already bending the rules, letting you stay as long as you have- it's supposed to be family only, you know that. Miss Jobassa will be in good hands, I assure you.”

He blows a sharp breath out through his nose, then nods. “Five minutes,” he says. The woman smiles and ducks back out the door, shutting it with a quiet click.

Furiosa means to ask what's coming and how best to deal with it, if he has a knife he can leave with her, if she should take her chances leaving now- but what comes out of her mouth is: “Rockatansky?” It must be his name, or a title perhaps, but it fits him ill.

The Fool blinks, caught off-guard by her question, before speaking, “It's my name. Max Rockatansky. Mm, usually just Max, but they, ah, like formalities.”

It brings up something in her memory- she clearly recalls asking for his name earlier and dubbing him 'Fool' in place of an answer, but in some murky way she thinks she might have heard him speak the name 'Max' before. It suits him, at any rate, though she's grown fond of considering him a fool.

“What do I need to know?” she asks, drawing herself in close as well as she can. Without the layer of painkillers her head is more clear, but she'll be less able to defend herself if she's hobbled by pain at every breath.

“You're safe,” he says automatically, as if he's been repeating it for a while. “The Doctor comes in, checks you over. Ah-” he reaches out for the discarded cannula, holds it up so he can see the smear of blood and messy knot tied into it. “They'll put this back in. It's medicine, you need it.”

“It's drugs,” she replies, tucking her hand away as if he would plunge the IV back in himself.

Max makes a frustrated noise. “You _need_ it,” he repeats. “If there's no painkillers, will you leave it?”

She considers this. It's clear that he thinks whatever liquid is draining into her is doing more good than harm, though it still makes her uneasy. But if it is medicine, and obviously a type stronger than what they have back at the Citadel, then surely she should take advantage of having it available.

“No painkillers,” she agrees. If it still makes her woozy, she'll just pull it out again. Unless they strap her into the restraints again- in which case, she might welcome a clouded mind.

“Okay,” he says with a nod. “You'll have to- you'll be alone. A nurse checks in every few hours. Should bring food, at some point.”

She hadn't even thought about eating, doesn't know if she should trust whatever they bring around. Healing takes food, the richer the better, and hospitals tend to have an abundance of bodies.

“I'll be back in the morning,” Max says, and finally drops the tubing to place his hand on her shoulder instead. His skin is warm through the thin fabric she's dressed in, the contact surprisingly welcome, reassuring. “You can leave then.”

  
  


The night passes uneasily. The Doctor had swept into the room, trailed by younger-looking healers with matching white robes, and poked and prodded at her and asked a hundred useless, meaningless questions about her past and present without ever once seeming to actually listen.

True to Max's prediction they do replace the IV into her hand, taping it down firmly and explaining that it was for her own good. One of the non-robed healers had swapped out the bag it was attached to for a fresh one, which at least made her somewhat hopeful that it wouldn't contain any more painkillers.

They detach the wires from the beeping device, but leave the plugs situated on her skin, saying they'll hook them back up if it looks like they need to. It reads as a threat, a reminder that she's a captive here- as if she could forget, with the open shackles still dangling off the sides of the cot.

The yellow-tunic healer goes off shift but introduces her replacement, a sturdy looking woman in far more subdued colors calling herself Barb. She comes bearing a plastic tray of various foods, a startling amount and prepared in strange ways, none resembling long pig in the slightest. Everything has a peculiar taste, not any shade of familiar dust or guzzoline or saltpeter, but sweetness and something indescribable, chemical. It's a struggle to eat even half of it, stomach unsettled by pain and circumstances, though she's loathe to let any go to waste.

When the tray is cleared away Furiosa is alone with her thoughts. She tests her strength and finds that she can stand, albeit shakily, and that the stand the IV bag hangs on is designed to roll across the floor. She uses the metal pole as a brace and walks the length of the small room, the flooring cold and slippery beneath her bare feet.

There's a door set into the wall, near the one leading to the hallway. She's panting shallowly by the time she reaches it, has to spend a long moment fighting grayness creeping around the edges of her mind as the pain and exertion seek to bury her.

When she regains her breath Furiosa presses down the latch and finds it unlocked. The door opens to reveal a white-tiled washroom, bare but for the basins that occupy it, gleaming clean and cold. When she tests the knobs on the sink fresh water come gushing out of the pipes, with not the faintest trace of rust or stagnation.

It seems an extravagant waste, to let a sick-room contain such unfettered access to water. She shuts off the flow after cupping her hand and taking a long drink, the taste of it fresh and clean and cold.

Furiosa leaves the washroom to examine the drawers, finds most of them locked. The few that aren't hold bandages or strange tools wrapped in flimsy paper, nothing remotely sturdy enough to aid her should danger strike. Finally, she approaches the solitary window, paned in uncracked clear glass. If she's lucky there will be some landmark she can use to orient herself, to figure out where this mysterious hospital lies.

There are lights burning everywhere, illuminating the surrounding area vividly despite how the sun has set. Spread out below her are trees and plants of all descriptions, living and vibrant. For a long moment she can do nothing but stare blankly, mesmerized by the sight of living green, not tucked away up high on top of the Citadel's spires but carpeting the ground, growing as the Green Place once had.

This must be where the hospital gets its compounds from, plants even the far-reaching arms of the Citadel hadn't been able to procure. It's so open though, unprotected- even as she watches there's movement from people walking carelessly through the greenery, barely glancing around for trouble, unhindered by anything but low flimsy fencing. Snipers on the rooftops, maybe, but it seems negligent to allow even the risk of damage.

She tears her eyes away from the green to see that an Old World building looms large across the way, windows intact and illuminated here and there, lines straight and unworn. Flashes of headlights from cars roll by, slow orderly lines as the sleek contours of the vehicles slip by one after another.

None of this makes sense. It looks like the stories passed around the fires at night, of gleaming cities from days long past. There's no way for this to have been hidden a few days riding from the Citadel, not when she's never heard so much as a whisper of it.

How, then, had Max brought her here? Surely it wasn't Valhalla or any other afterlife, if she's still injured and weak. Perhaps she's trapped in a fever-dream still, her mind throwing out fanciful visions while her body convulses far away. Is this what is waiting for her, when her body gives out?

Furiosa closes her eyes against the alien sight before her, takes as deep a breath as she can manage without sending spikes of pain through her chest. Everything around her is strange and unfamiliar, even down to the Fool taking on a new guise and a new name.

Except, it all still feels real to her senses. Strange, yes, but the cool metal in her hand feels no less real than the wheel of the War Rig had, the loose fabric enveloping her just as convincing as the familiar scratch of her stitched leathers.

The door that she'd foolishly turned her back to clicks open and she jerks around, hand gripping the IV's stand, ready to turn it into a weapon. It does little to reassure her when she sees that it's just Barb, come to check on her as promised.

“You shouldn't be out of bed!” the healer says, striding over. There's a bundle of papers in her hand but no sign of a weapon, and Furiosa lets herself be led back to the mattress, mind reeling.

“Where am I?” she asks, hoping that she might get a more clear answer than relying on Max.

“Alice Springs Hospital,” Barb says offhandedly, fussing with the blanket as she gets Furiosa situated. “Good thing you left the IV in this time, makes dosing tricky if we have to stop and start it.”

The name means nothing to Furiosa; she wonders what she expected. A name to unlock an old memory, perhaps, some long-ago story her mother might have shared.

“Now, you just relax, get some sleep if you can. You're out of the woods but still in danger, you need rest.”

There's no chance of sleep, even as weakened and tired as she is. Barb flicks a switch on the wall before she leaves and some of the lights flicker off, leaving the room dimmer, less glaring.

The healers intrude at even intervals throughout the night, fussing whenever she isn't in the cot, taking measurements and listening and as necessary replacing the bag of fluids. Furiosa alternates pacing and staring out the window, trying to reconcile what's happening with what makes sense.

The sun rises slowly, and she finds herself watching the door for the Fool to reappear rather than looking out at the unfamiliar world outside.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, apparently I completely forgot that I never posted part two... Whoops! Sorry about the wait, I promise it wasn't intentional. I've got the next chapter already drafted and awaiting editing, so hopefully updates won't take quite so long in the future. :3

The Fool returns just after she's been given a morning meal, real fruit and _eggs_ and fanciful types of bread, all in shocking abundance. It goes down easier than the food had the night before, settles well into her stomach despite how uneasy she feels.

He hovers awkwardly besides the bed as she eats, clears his throat and mumbles out, “Are you, ah, better? We can leave, if you're okay."

Furiosa chews slowly, takes stock of her body. The drugs are no longer weighing her down, and while the stab wounds hurt fiercely when she moves the wrong way or breathes too deeply, it's not as bad as some of her other injuries have been. The infection that set in after she lost her arm nearly killed her, and left her too weak to move for days on end. Whatever medicine these healers have, it's powerful.

“I feel better,” she says simply.

Max hums affirmatively, nods his head and fidgets while waiting for her to finish. She takes her time eating, though it all still tastes strange, not knowing when she'll have this much fresh food available again.

“I brought clothes,” he says when she sets down the plastic utensil at last, plate cleared, and unslings a pack from around his shoulders. Opened it reveals not her own familiar clothing or anything borrowed from the Citadel's stores but new cuts of cloth, as clean and fine as what he himself was wearing. The fabric is bright and incredibly soft when she touches it, doesn't seem as if it will provide even the slightest protection.

“Max,” Furiosa says, testing the name on her tongue. “Where am I?”

He freezes, and though she's tired from the long night and her injuries she's not drugged anymore, she won't accept half-truths. “A safe place,” he tries, and she stares him down steadily.

“There's things in this room I've only heard of in stories,” she says, flicking her eyes to the lights overhead, the wiretech crowded around the edges. “And outside that window..." She shakes her head, still not sure she believes what her eyes told her, all that green just laying on the ground for people to walk through. "Where am I?”

Max fidgets for a moment, gaze darting away guiltily. “I'll explain,” he offers, “But- not yet.” His eyes when they meet hers ask an unspoken question: do you trust me?

Furiosa grits her teeth but nods her head in acceptance. She does trust the Fool, as strange a thing as it feels to admit, and so far she's been treated to medicine and water and nothing that says she is in immediate danger. She will have to content herself with learning what she can on her own, in the meantime.

The Doctor and his flock of healers arrive, talking to each other about her condition in long unfamiliar words as if she's not even in the room. It rankles, but she's used to disrespect from medics, and these at least have yet to do more than condescend. Even when she was alone the night before, they cleaned and rebandaged her wounds without lingering on her exposed skin, didn't let their hands or even eyes roam.

Max clears his throat as the healers wind down, drawing attention to himself. He shifts uneasily as their eyes land on him, but holds his ground. “She wants to leave,” he says. “Needs discharge papers.”

“I can't recommend letting her leave,” the Doctor says, “The infection is under control, yes, but there's the risk of relapse especially if she strains herself, she's still showing signs of trace radiation exposure, has _no_ medical history on record-”

Furiosa doesn't know anything about how this hospital runs, but she knows a fight when she sees one. If words fail... she has no weapons, wonders what sort of guards there must be for a place such as this, so richly stocked. Staying longer means racking up more of a debt, and she weighs the risks of both options in her mind.

“We're leaving,” Max says, voice firm. The Doctor sends him a glare, then turns to look Furiosa fully in the eye for the first time since she's been here.

“It's her decision,” he says. “Miss Jobassa, it's in your best interest to stay until you're recovered. You have a long way to go still, and leaving now could do more harm than good.”

Furiosa slants a look at Max, taking in his expression. She wants to leave, to return to the Citadel and the girls and the clusterfuck that is surely brewing with the remaining War Boys, but she doesn't want to alienate these people if she needs them in the future. Her Fool looks uneasy, and angry- he doesn't seem concerned about burning bridges.

“I'm leaving,” she says firmly. The less time under their debt the better, as far as she is concerned, and she is not so unwell that she has no chance at fighting should it come to that.

The Doctor huffs out an aggrieved sigh, “This is against medical advice, you understand? Fine. I'll send a nurse in with the paperwork.”

A few of the younger healers regard her curiously as they file back out of the room, blindingly white robes flapping behind them, but none say anything. Max relaxes minutely, then cocks his head to the side as if something has just occurred to him.

“Can you read and write?” he asks, a question totally out of the blue. “Need to sign your name, at least.”

“I can sign my own damn name,” Furiosa replies, “Not that anyone here seems to know it.” The Many Mothers had taught her young, as they did to all their children, and there had been an abundance of crumbling wordburgers in the Vault. Even most War Boys learned the basics, to better comprehend the sacred maintenance manuals for their vehicles, to be able to scrawl their names in order to mark their property. It's a reminder of how far into the wastes this road warrior travels, that he'd have encountered plenty of people for whom the answer would be 'no.'

He makes a wordless questioning noise, face scrunched in confusion, not understanding her remark.

“Mary Jobassa was my mother,” she explains, “Did these people know her? She never spoke of a place like this.”

“Ah,” Max says, “I told them. As a, hm, family name.” He shifts, clearly uncomfortable, and she allows the subject to drop. It didn't matter what they called her, as long as she was free to leave without repercussion.

One of the non-robed healers comes in and pulls the cannula out of Furiosa's veins, covers the barely-there injury with a scrap of gauze and tape as if the pinprick of blood left was worth the waste of supplies. She then hands over a stack of papers, covered in minute words unlike any writing Furiosa has seen- like the printing found in wordburgers, letters stark and clear against the creamy white page. There's a thin yellow sheet underneath, and another in pink, each identical and conjoined at the top.

“Sign the top sheet here, and here, and put the date there,” the healer says, gesturing to various blank lines on the page, “Then keep the pink copy.”

As Furiosa writes her name neatly, mother's name appended at the Fool's quiet insistence, she finds that the stylus writes smoothly in ink, not charcoal, despite there having been no inkwell provided for her to dip it into. Some sort of internal storage, she thinks, and wonders if there's any way to take it with her.

She doesn't know what the healer means by writing 'the date', and leaves the section blank. Max pulls out what looks like the same potential-communication-device from before out of his pocket, and though it's tilted away from her, she can see half of it light up in a blaze of colors before going dim again. Not wholly his imagination he was talking to the other day, then.

“Write '21-dash-10-dash-15',” he says, and she wonders what sort of meaning the string of numbers has; if, since he consulted the (probable) communication device, it was connected with whoever he was speaking to.

“Okay, thanks!” the healer chirps when Furiosa has finished with writing. “Here's your prescriptions, you can get them at the pharmacy downstairs on your way out.” She passes over a few pieces of paper to Furiosa, who finds that they're covered in an illegible scrawl. “Take your time leaving, it's a slow day so we don't need the room yet.”

Max nod and grunts, and as the healer leaves Furiosa shifts so she's no longer on the bed but standing on her own feet once more, careful to not aggravate her wounds. The dress she's in is flimsy and cut open down the back, though it's held closed with long fabric ties, and she wishes for the familiarity of her accustomed clothes. The new clothes she's been given are loose, soft, not fit to last long on the road, though at least they cover her more solidly. She slips them on while Max watches the doorway and finds that the garments lay strangely, but not unpleasantly, against her skin.

The shoes are patently ridiculous- not like any boots she knows but a type of sandal, little more than a foam sole and a strap of plastic to hold it in place. They bend and snap disconcertingly against her feet when she takes a step, and she wonders if it might be better to leave her feet bare, hot sand outside or no.

The hallway is a maze, full of people bustling to and fro and ringing alarms, voices crackling through speakers set high on the walls. It's deeply unsettling, even as used to the activity of the Citadel as she is, but she marches as steadily as she can behind the Fool who seems to know where he's going. There's a mechanical lift at the end of the hallway, sleek and clean like everything in this hospital is, nothing like the rickety old thing she remembers being deep below the spires, and they take it down to the lowest level.

“Wait,” Max says to her as they pass a large set of glass doors, rummaging around until he comes up with the illegible slips of paper she had been given by the healer. “Medicine.”

Through the doors is a counter and rows upon rows of small plastic bottles, from which she watches more white-robed healers pour measures of tablets and powders and liquids. There aren't any defenses that she can see, beyond the chest-high counter, and Furiosa wonders with a touch of apprehension what sort of place this must be, to have such wealth out in the open without fear of attack.

The Fool handles talking with the healers, exchanging code words that she doesn't understand, and indicates that she can sit on the low padded bench tucked into the corner while they wait. She keeps her feet under her instead, leans heavily against the wall and watches out the glass doors as people stream by the hallway outside.

There's a huge variety, but none that remind Furiosa much of the type she's familiar with. A few have extremely tame body mods- studded jewels or metal stretching their earlobes, tats swirling across the skin of their arms, shocks of dyed hair- but that's the extent of it. There's no scarring, no body paint, clothes a wholly unpractical mix of bright colors and delicate materials but seemingly all pieced together with skill and care, not ragged and worn as she is used to seeing.

The most surprising thing is how healthy the people themselves look, even those in the same type of flimsy dress she was given to wear that must surely mark them as patients. Their skin is clear, clean, any wounds wrapped under white gauze, limbs sleek with well-fed flesh. People who are more ancient than any she has seen before, long past the points their bodies would have given out even with the care of a dedicated tribe, are smiling and at ease as they walk or roll in wheeled chairs past the doors.

There are no guards visible, no one wearing armor or bearing weapons, and she wonders if it's because there are none- or if the Old World tech this place has means she can't recognize any of it. Had she attempted to fight her way out, would she have gotten anywhere?

Finally, the healer hands over a crisp white paper bag that rattles, and with a final exchange of unfamiliar words she and Max are free to leave the dispensary. Furiosa doesn't know what payment he gave to them, saw nothing leave his hands that wasn't passed back almost immediately, but they seem satisfied with whatever trade was conducted.

The door to the outside is unguarded as well and she braces herself for the rush of non-regulated air, the familiar scorching heat of it, and is shocked when she pulls in a breath and it's... clean. Fresh, like the air inside, with only the faintest tinge of exhaust fumes, and nearly as cold as the indoors despite the sun shining down.

There's a black car idling on the smooth asphalt a few paces away, round and bulbous in design, glass windows intact and not a hint of any sort of modifications for safety, for defense. The Fool pulls open the rear door and the interior is clean and sleek, a level of lushness that even the leaders of the Triumvirate hadn't achieved. He gestures to the inside, wanting her to get in, but she hesitates.

“It's safe,” Max says, misinterpreting her reluctance.

Furiosa wants to know who this man is, that he has such a car, access to this hospital, fine clothes to spare. If it wasn't for how grounded she feels she would be sure that she's in the land of the dead, and the vehicle before her heralding one last eternal ride. But surely she would be the one driving if that was the case.

She folds herself into the rear of the cab carefully, half expecting the driver to be some faceless creature to spirit her away anyway, but sees instead a perfectly ordinary man meeting her gaze through the rear-view mirror, face only mildly weathered though his hair's gone gray. He smiles at her amiably.

“I'm Marty,” he says as Max climbs into the car besides her, shutting the door behind him. She doesn't offer her name in return. The Fool might trust him, but she has no reason to.

“I'm sure you're wondering where you are,” he pauses to direct a look towards Max, who just twitches and grunts, before meeting her eyes again, not looking much at the road as he steps on the accelerator and glides the car smoothly forward. “But the question isn't where, it's _when_.”

Furiosa has little patience for riddles on a good day, and the trek through the hospital and the long night have left her more tired than she expected, her wounds throbbing with every shallow breath.

“Speak plainly,” she says, “Who are you? What is this place?”

“You're in the past,” Marty says, steering them through the smoothest roads she's ever encountered, driving very slowly but seemingly in no danger of being attacked despite the numerous vehicles driving around them. “Before the world fell there were many strange devices, lost in your time. Phones, televisions, water purifiers, computers.” All things she's heard about in stories, relics of a time long past, proof of nothing but his having heard stories himself.

“One such device allows a person to travel through time as easily as a car crosses distances. There are limits, of course, and dire consequences for interfering where one shouldn't-” besides her Max makes a protesting noise that the driver ignores to continue unabated, “-but it is possible, to move from one day to the next without living them.”

More riddles. She shakes her head, regrets the motion instantly when her vision wavers and flickers to gray for a second. “Speak plainly,” Furiosa repeats.

“For most people, time is a road that only travels one direction,” Marty says. “Your car is the present, the road ahead the future, the road behind your past. Yes?”

She's never bothered to think much about the flow of time, beyond counting the days she'd endured and wondering how many might be yet ahead, but Furiosa supposes that makes as much sense as anything else. She nods.

“What we have is a car that can leave this road. A push of nitrous to speed into the future ahead of schedule, gears to throw us into reverse and revisit the places we've been before. You in the car always experience the present, but _where_ that present is, changes.” It's a very strange thought, that time might not be a fixed march forward but something that could be navigated, a thought she's not sure she can comprehend, at least not right away.

“You were in the wasteland, hmm, how many days past the Fall?” Marty asks, seemingly changing topics at random.

Furiosa has never bothered to keep track, finding it a useless benchmark in her daily life where everything was neatly split into _before_ and _after_ her capture, anyway, but Max answers for her. “Twenty-thousand.”

“So, yesterday your car on the road of time was twenty-thousand days past the Fall of the World. Today, you are about... three hundred days past the start of the second Oil War. In another four thousand, the bombs will drop.” Though he speaks with confidence, the words Marty says are madness. Those events are long past, remembered only in the stories of History People, not still to come. And yet, she concedes, already she has seen things that should be long extinct except for memories.

Perhaps sensing her disbelief, he smiles kindly at her through the rear-view mirror. “We'll show you the computer, once you've had some rest. We're nearly home, anyway.”

Home? Furiosa realizes with a sinking feeling that the Fool had never said they were returning to the Citadel, just that they were leaving the hospital.

She looks out the windows and sees a continuation of the same terrain she'd spied from the hospital's window, rich red earth covered with lush greenery. Buildings dot the landscape, square edges marked out with flimsy fences, cars left undefended on neat patches of road-turf.

It's far too expansive to be some sort of guarded encampment, too massive to be lurking near the Citadel undetected. But the thought that she might really be somehow in a Before-Time place is... overwhelming. Furiosa wraps her arms around her ribs, presses her hand down hard against the wound that saved her life. It hurts, stealing her breath away as the pain washes over her, but it's undeniably real.

“Alright?” Max says quietly from besides her. She doesn't answer, just focuses on smoothing her breathing through the constriction in her chest.

The buildings grow fewer and fewer until they reach one surrounded by a high wire fence, and the car slows to a crawl. Max leaves the vehicle to pull open the gate, shuts it behind them as Marty drives through, an opening appearing in the building directly ahead as a large gate raises off the ground. He slides the car inside, cuts the engine.

This room, at least, seems familiar. Tools hang from the walls, a work-bench lies cluttered with scraps, the smell of guzzoline permeates the air as soon as the driver opens his door. But there's also wood and fabric and plastic everywhere, splashes of bright colored labels written in words rather than symbols.

A second car sits next to them, dark and angular and indescribably familiar, though Furiosa doesn't think she's seen it before. It's been out in the wastes, she can tell instantly, has seen the type of violence the vehicle she's sitting in now would be chewed up by.

Max ducks inside as the door begins sliding shut again with a mechanical rasp, a flimsy barrier against the world. He reaches out to help her out of the car and she doesn't need the help, even as weakened as she is, but welcomes the grounding touch of his hand in hers anyway.

“Up for the house tour?” Marty asks cheerfully, unlocking a moderately secured wooden door set into the wall. The room beyond is dark but for the light coming through the windows, a welcome change from the electric glare of the hospital.

“Front room,” Marty says as she steps over the threshold, Max close at her back. “I'll show off the fun stuff later- you're going to like the tv, I think.” The room is huge, crowded with furniture that's worn but clean and plush, wooden cabinets and shelves against the walls, stacks of wordburgers and miscellaneous objects she can't identify. The edges aren't as sharp as the hospital, but the walls are the same smooth material in a muted tone, a woven carpet underfoot.

“Kitchen,” he says, gesturing through an open doorway into a tiled room with a sink and dozens of cabinets, counters housing unfamiliar objects, a large wooden table and chairs, a strange humming metal cabinet. It's clearly hooked up to some sort of motor and that catches her attention, but she can't guess at the purpose of it. “Let us know when you get hungry, it can be overwhelming at first.”

He gives a pointed look over her shoulder to Max, who makes a sort of affronted grunt in response, tugging a smile onto Marty's face before he pivots and leads them down a short hallway.

“Down the hall we have storage,” he taps a closed doorway as they pass it. “Off-limits,” he says for another, this one with a thick metal door set into a reinforced frame. It's jarring among the rest of the flimsy doors, and Furiosa edges away respectfully even as she makes a note to find out what's behind it at some point.

“Bathroom,” this door he opens, revealing a tiled wash-room, cluttered with fabric and objects on the counter. “Need the specifics?”

She shakes her head; it looks the same as the one at the hospital, barring the personal touches.

“Good, good,” he says, closing the door back up. They've reached the end of the short hallway, two identical doors set across from each other, a small window looking to the outside letting in a breeze. “This is my room.” Marty taps the left-hand door with his knuckles, “Holler if you need anything.”

“You'll be here, right next door,” he says, and pulls open the second door.

It's large, is Furiosa's first thought as she steps over the threshold. There's a fairly massive mattress piled with blankets and pillows jutting out from one wall, a trio of windows streaming sunlight and air from the outside. More wooden chests line the walls, covered with all sorts of odd bits of clutter and decoration.

“Lights,” Max says from the doorway, drawing her attention away from reflexively assessing the defensible points of the room. He clicks a switch on the wall that sets a lamp in the ceiling to burning, then flicks it back down to turn it off. “Locks from the inside.” He pulls the door just far enough closed that she can see the inner knob, demonstrates the simple mechanism.

As flimsy as wooden doors are, Furiosa expects that it's more for peace of mind than anything else- a determined assailant would be slowed down somewhat, but not stopped by it. Enough time for her to jump through the windows, perhaps, she thinks and walks over to check them over.

There's an animal running loose outside the house, and it starts barking when it catches sight of her. She jerks back away, startled by the noise and the sight of a living animal. Dogs were often vicious to strangers- she'd tangled with enough to learn that lesson- and she's still weaponless, doesn't even have her second arm to raise in defense.

“He's no danger,” Max says, which is hardly reassuring, but there's a metal screen of some kind over the open window space, and she supposes that will serve to keep the animal out.

Furiosa turns from the window and the sight of the dog, who after a long minute of noise ceases barking, to see that Max hasn't moved far from his spot near the door. Marty is nowhere to be seen, but she thinks she hears him moving somewhere down the hall.

“You should rest,” Max says, and sets the paper bag from the dispensary down on a small table near the mattress. There's already a pitcher resting on it, and a glass cup, and a small electric lamp.

It's a sensible suggestion, and she's certainly exhausted, but the thought of finding sleep in a strange place when she's utterly, horribly defenseless doesn't seem possible. She doesn't reply, but Max nods as if he can read her answer off her face. He steps further into the room, opens one of the drawers and rummages around, displacing fabric. After a moment he makes a quiet triumphant noise and pulls out a small knife, holds it out to her handle-first.

Furiosa takes it gladly. It's a good blade, well cared for, and just having it in her hand makes her feel more secure, more in control. She cautiously sits on the edge of the bed and finds that it's shockingly soft, even more so than the hospital's cot had been.

“Will you keep watch?” she asks, not looking at the Fool, hating that she needs the reassurance.

He hums in reply, steps close like he might reach out to reassure her before shifting back, towards a chair in one of the corners of the room. It can see both doors and windows from where it's positioned, and knowing he's there keeping watch lets Furiosa relax enough to curl up on the mattress, secure in the knowledge that there was someone looking out for danger. She grips the borrowed knife tightly, feeling very out of place and in no inconsiderable amount of pain and, she admits to herself as her eyes start slipping closed from exhaustion, a little scared.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please ignore my geography failures; I tried.

Once she falls asleep, fitful at first on the strange soft bed, she doesn't seem to fully awaken until after the sun rises the next day. Furiosa recalls being woken up to drink water and swallow capsules, taking in at least one meal, but it's all a hazy blur as her body recuperates from the strain she's put on it.

When she does at last wake for good, Max is nowhere to be seen. She sits up to take in the empty room and finds that her chest aches slightly less than it had, breaths coming easier, pain remaining subdued until she tentatively presses down on the bandaged areas. If nothing else, the medicine she's been given seems to be working spectacularly; she's healing at a rate she never would have imagined, had she been left in the Organic Mechanic's care.

The smell of some sort of meat cooking wafts through the air and it causes Furiosa to realize that, despite the meal she might have eaten at some point, she is viciously hungry. The pitcher at the bedside is full of clean fresh water, and she drinks down a cupful before standing on somewhat-shaky legs and opening the door.

There's music echoing down the hallway as she pads her way over, nothing like the jagged battle ballads Coma Doof provides but the sort of thing she dimly recalls from listening to the gramophone in the Vault, a blend of instruments and voices sounding as if an entire band of musicians was standing just out of sight.

Alarmingly, the dog from outside comes barreling down the hallway towards her in a blur of brownish fur, and Furiosa freezes in place for a split second. The knife she'd been given was, stupidly, sitting on the edge of the bedside table and thus utterly useless. The animal barks, mouth wide, and she's close enough to the door of the washroom that she darts through the open doorway, slams it shut on the dog just before it reaches her. It sniffs loudly at the crack of the door and barks again, but doesn't tear into the flimsy wood of it.

“Bandit!” a male voice calls out, and it takes Furiosa a moment to place the speaker as Marty from the day before. “Get away from there, you dumb mutt.”

The dog whines, but there's the sound of its nails clicking on the wooden floor as it walks away from the door. The music drops away, and a moment later someone walks down the hallway, one step slightly out of rhythm.

The person knocks on the door. “Furiosa? Dog's gone.” It's Max, and she opens the door to see him looking slightly abashed. “Thought you'd, hm, sleep longer,” he says, ducking his head, “Sorry.”

She says nothing in reply but nods, and he stands confused for a moment as to why she isn't stepping into the hallway before his eyes track behind her to the fixtures of the washroom. Max makes some slight noise and ducks his head again. "Food's almost done," he tells her, and steps back away from the door as she nudges it shut again.

There's a huge, uncracked mirror hanging above the sink and Furiosa thinks about the best way to divide it up to fit as many wing mirrors as possible while she closes her eyes against the brightness of its reflection. Opens her eyes and sees herself, not grease-smeared and determined as she's used to catching glimpses of but tired and worn down, out of place against the clean lines of the electrically-lit room.

After another few minutes she leaves the washroom, and this time she reaches the kitchen without trouble. She steps onto the cold tiled floor and sees that there's a few dishes piled with food on the table, including a pan sizzling over a small flame that seems to be the source of the meat smell. A door tucked into the corner that she hadn't noticed the day before opens and Marty strides through, cutting off the sight of the green outdoors behind him as it closes.

“Bandit's away, don't worry,” he says with a warm apologetic smile. “Once you meet him properly he'll calm down; he just loves strangers.”

Furiosa isn't sure she wants to meet the animal- if his 'loving' strangers was tantamount to attacking them, she has low expectations for what behavior he inflicts on those he already knows.

“But it's good to see you up!” Marty continues, “Breakfast is almost done, you're in perfect time.”

Max hums affirmatively, poking at the cooking pan before extinguishing the flame with a turn of a dial. Marty pulls out a chair from the table for her to take, then sits down across from her a moment later and starts pointing out the various dishes, naming each for her benefit.

The amount and variety of foods is staggering, and all of it fresh instead of salted or smoked; is untouched by vermin or rot. Even in the Vault they never ate this well and Furiosa savors each bite.

Max ushers her into the front room afterwards, Marty staying in the kitchen to deal with the dishes using what sounds like an alarmingly wasteful amount of water flowing from the taps. There's a couch for lounging on and she hates being off her feet, especially in such a strange place as this, but there was no sense in standing if it would only make her weak and dizzy. The blanket Max insists on tucking around her is soft and warm, cutting off the slight chill that permeates the air.

“You don't believe,” Max says once he's finished fussing with the edges, stepping back from the sofa without sitting down himself, “That you're in the past.”

“How can I?” she asks, because there's no way to know. Furiosa is fairly certain by now this is no land of the dead, no fever dream, but it could still be an exceptionally well-stocked fortress far beyond the edges of the wasteland she knows- beyond the Plains of Silence, maybe, or the Salt he'd turned them away from.

He hums and turns to rummage around with something on the other side of the couch for a moment.

She wonders how the Fool came to be here, himself. From what little she's observed of Marty, he seems to fit in these soft and clean surroundings- but Max doesn't, in some indescribable way. He was made of the same true wasteland grit as she was, unmistakable even when dressed in fine new clothes. It was the difference between the vehicles in the garage, the rounded contours of the car they'd driven from the hospital in next to the angular rig besides it.

Max appears back in her line of sight, carrying what might be a very strange book. It's large and thin and black and, once he's seated himself next to her blanket-covered feet, it unfolds along the middle so that one end sticks up in the air while the other rests in his lap. Instead of pages the inside is made up of a flat, slightly shiny material along one half and a jumble of letters decorating the other.

“This,” he says, and presses down a button on the lettered half, “is a computer.” It whirs faintly and the non-lettered half lights up, flashing brilliant colors and a few nonsense words.

There are stories about what computers were, how they could be used- “the world at your fingertips,” one of the Mothers who'd lived through the Fall had always said with deep longing, “anything you could think of, faster than you could think it.”

Furiosa doesn't know how this could be faked, nor how Max might have kept one safe, in working condition. It was rumored that the Citadel had a functioning one deep within its caches, something the few dedicated wire-rats talked about with the same reverence most paid to the sacred engines. This device is sleek and undamaged, hardly worn around the edges- it couldn't possibly have survived the wasteland she knows.

The display settles on an image of the dog she'd run into earlier, as realistic as if she was looking at the beast itself. She's seen photographs before, weathered and delicate images stuck fast on paper, but this is vibrant and fresh like everything else about this place.

Max clicks something, turning the display white, and starts pressing at what Furiosa realizes are buttons with individual letters on them. She abandons her spot against the far corner of the couch to lean forward, bracing herself with her arm against the back cushions so she can watch him tap out patterns that coalesce into a mash of unfamiliar words, tiny but stark black against the white.

It happens too fast for her to keep up with the steps, but there's soon a map filling the display. It's shockingly detailed, far more than can be expected from even the most skilled artist, and grows only more so as Max clicks buttons, enlarging a particular section.

“The house,” he says, and the view switches from an overhead shot to something as if she was standing in the road. It shows the same high wire fence Furiosa remembers pulling through from the day before, the same building obscured by plants. A quick glance confirms the locations of the windows and doors she can see, identical to the image on the display.

Max turns his head over his shoulder towards her, smiling faintly, but she's too mesmerized by what the computer's showing to pay him any mind.

“How?” Furiosa asks, leaning closer to the display, not caring that it means pressing up against his shoulder as she does so. It was connected to a much larger map seconds earlier, somehow only growing in detail the closer it drew, not at all like the paper pictures she's ever encountered. Even with a magnifying lens there was a limit to how much detail could be seen, but here it seems endless.

“Satellites,” he says, hand pointing upwards beyond the ceiling, “Some have cameras. They take pictures, turn them into a map.” He sounds pleased with himself, as if he had some part in creating this. She's seen his attempts at map-making and it suddenly makes more sense, how he might have a sense of the terrain as if he was a bird soaring high above.

“Where's the Citadel?” she asks, because she has to know. Will this map show a vast distance between them, reveal her to be in some secluded settlement while the others struggle out in the wasteland? Or had Marty spoken the truth about her somehow being in the past, and they're separated by far more than just distance?

“The others,” Furiosa says as the thought hits her, stiffening and pulling away from Max's back and his computer. “Are they alright?” The girls were unharmed aside from scrapes and bruises, the last she remembers, but it's been days at least that she spent lying up in the hospital and there are numerous ways for the War Boys who were left behind to wrest control back from them.

Max doesn't pause in his movements, the display sweeping across far-away ground. “They're safe,” he says, “As you left them.”

It's not very comforting, but Furiosa supposes that there isn't anything she can do until she either convinces Max to drive her back or wrings the directions out of him to go herself. And if she really is somehow in the past, then would her absence even be noticed? Does every day spent in the past turn into a day missed in what should be the present, or does the time slide by unequally?

“Us,” Max says, drawing her attention back to where he's pointing at a spot near the edge of the computer's display. It's too small to make out most details but there's a black line overlaying the image, beginning where he's indicating.

“The Citadel,” he says, and moves his finger to indicate a spot near the other edge, following the line. There are tick marks with numbers written along it, and a small white box near the bottom of the image proclaiming a “measured distance of 318.47 kilometers.” Furiosa's never seen a map with such a precise scale, but even accounting for it being measured as the crow flies it was undeniably within a day's travel, well within the distance she herself has roamed on raids and scouting runs. There was no chance for this settlement to be hidden near the Citadel, not without her knowing about it.

Max lets the image linger before enlarging the area at the far end of the line. The landscape rushes by, until it settles on something familiar and alien at the same time. It's an aerial view, not the ground-up photo she was given of the house they're currently occupying, but it is unmistakably the three pillars of the Citadel jutting above the dusty ground.

There's traces of greenery on their tops, but nothing like the cultivated growth Furiosa knows. There are no bridges spanning the distance between them, no clusters of Wretched huddled in the shadows, no signs of life whatsoever. The Last Road stands as a stark black line nearby, disappearing off the edge of the display as it cuts towards what should be Gas Town, but there's no hard-packed dirt path connecting the trade route, no sign of the road towards the Bullet Farm.

It looks as if no one has ever so much as driven up to the base of the spires, much less built an empire around them.

“It's not there,” she says, “None of it.”

Max shakes his head, “Not yet.”

He adjusts the image again after a moment, clicks buttons to lay down a glowing blue line across the landscape to the east, harshly artificial. It takes Furiosa a moment before she realizes that he's tracing roughly the path they took as they fled.

There's the Buzzard's territory, clinging to the shadows of the Citadel, then the flat unclaimed expanse where she rode through the sandstorm. Where they tried to kill each other, though it seems very far away now, and where he later saved her life. The Rock Rider's canyon poses a problem, the exact path hidden from view or perhaps changed with time, but beyond... After a length of undifferentiated ground there's an explosion of green, kilometers of it stretching out, surrounding a broken-up lake of water.

“The Green Place,” Furiosa says with awe, amazed to see her birth place once more, not as a bog but closer to how she remembers it truly being, even if this was just a picture. It was nothing but a swamp when she saw it last, a dead place that they first were mired in and then skirted around entirely to avoid, but now again it's green and growing. Max hums in response, vibrations traveling through her where she's pressed herself up close to see the computer's display.

He lets her drink in the sight of it for a long moment, though it's different from the land she knew, before continuing to lay down his blue pathway. She spies a hard-edged object amid the organic heaves of earth and reaches her hand around to point at it.

“Stop, there!”

Max obediently pauses his tracery, and even enlarges the view after a moment. From this angle nothing can be seen but the roof and a distorted shadow, but Furiosa knows exactly what it is.

“That was where the Eldest Mothers lived,” she says, tracing the contours of it with a finger. The soft surface of the display discolors faintly when she does so and she rapidly pulls back, not wanting to damage the device. “It burned, when I was still a child. Raiders. That tree was much bigger, and the young ones would all sit in the branches to listen to the Mothers talk.”

It's surreal, to see it looking fresh and whole, when her last memory of it was as a smoking ruin. Furiosa wonders if there's even now a group of Vuvalini living there. Or had they come across this building later and claimed it for themselves? The history she'd been taught never went into detail about how they came to be at the Green Place, just that it was theirs to protect.

“Where's the Salt?” Furiosa asks after a moment, when she's had her fill of staring at the angular roof and still-growing tree. She wants to know what they had almost ridden to, before charging back for the Citadel. Max shrinks the view back a bit and takes up the glowing line again, passing through featureless red terrain punctuated by the occasional metal watch-tower until they reach the edge of another body of water. This time he shrinks, and shrinks, and shrinks, but the blue-black water fills the display, seemingly endless.

“It's an ocean,” he says, and it's a word Furiosa has never heard used except in the abstract but the implications still settle across her heavily.

“Did you know?” she demands. “You were going to let us try to ride across it.”

Max flinches, hunching his shoulders in on himself. “I wasn't sure,” he says, and then, lowly like he's trying to convince himself even as he says it, “You would have turned around.”

Furiosa leans away from the computer again, shaken, all the good humor she'd cultivated by seeing what the Green Place had once looked like gone. If they had tried to cross the Salt as planned they surely would have died. And she'd been one of the ones to endorse the idea, remembering stories told about a safe harbor surrounded by a salt flat. Would they have turned around before their supplies ran dangerously low, or would they have pressed forward, lured by the promise of a place that had never existed?

'Hope is a mistake,' Max had said in warning, that night, and she can't truly fault him- information was never given freely in the wasteland, only bartered, and their debt had been settled by his accepting a bike. He had come back, anyway, had suggested a better path and given the very blood in his veins, which surely counts more heavily.

“It's eleven,” Marty says from the entrance to the kitchen, startling the both of them. “Time for a dose of meds.” Furiosa had forgotten that he was even in the building, caught up in reliving the flight away from the Citadel.

“I'll get them,” Max says, placing the computer carefully in the place he was just sitting before walking out of the room, towards the hallway. Furiosa sinks back to the far end of the couch, away from the computer and its revelation.

Marty walks over and peers at the computer, fiddling with the buttons until the whole glowing path is displayed, terrain reduced to broad strokes. “Looks like quite a trek,” he says with a smile, “Not that I could get much of the story out of Max.”

This doesn't surprise her. The Fool did not seem to be a man given to using his voice overly much, at least not in the span of time she's known him. It's an obvious prompt for Furiosa to play story-teller in his stead, but she has no heart for it at the moment, and remains silent.

Max reappears with a cup of water in one hand and a small pile of pills in the other, which he holds out for her to take.

“Yellow's a painkiller,” he says after tipping them into her waiting palm, and she looks at it in contemplation before tucking it securely between her fingers. The pain in her chest isn't bad enough that she's willing to submit to the fog it brings, and she wonders vaguely if they hadn't been so kind as to warn her the day before. It would explain why she slept for so long, she thinks, throwing the remaining loose tablets into her mouth before reaching for the water to swallow them down with.

“Would you like to meet Bandit?” Marty asks when she hands the empty glass and discarded yellow pill back to Max to take away. “He's friendly, I promise. Just excitable.”

Furiosa wants to meet the dog about as much as she wants to tell its owner the story of their flight, but perhaps this will stop the beast from lunging at her in the future. She acquiesces with a nod, and he smiles encouragingly before disappearing to fetch the animal.

Marty brings the dog inside, leashed with a sturdy line, and lets it near enough to the couch for Furiosa to reach out and touch. It's not barking anymore but its mouth is open, tongue sticking out as it pants, tail wagging hard enough to shake its entire back.

“Bandit, this is Furiosa,” Marty says to the animal as if it has any way of understanding his words. “She's staying with us for a while, so be on your best behavior.”

Max crouches awkwardly next to the dog, one hand rubbing at the fur of his ears. With the other he reaches out, gestures for Furiosa to bring her hand over to join his. She's wary of the sharp teeth on display but extends her hand anyway, lets it sniff her fingers before moving to pat tentatively at the top of the dog's head.

She hasn't touched a living animal in thousands of days- the few creatures the Citadel bred were kept high above, tended to only by the most trusted of greenthumbs. There were insects and reptiles, Furiosa supposes, the rare bird, but nothing covered with fur since she left the Green Place behind. Certainly nothing she'd ever touched without intending to make a meal out of or defend against.

Beneath her fingers the dog is warm, fur greasy and soft, and he quivers even as he's held in place. It's not much like the few ragged guard dogs she's encountered before, all bones and rage beneath their flea-bit fur.

“There, now he'll know you,” Marty says. He relaxes the leash and Bandit strains forward, not seeming aggressive but- his tongue lashes out, laves the skin of her forearm, and she pulls back with a startled gasp.

“He licked me,” Furiosa says disbelievingly, looking down at the animal in surprise. Bandit looks pleased with himself, grinning in an absent way, and presses himself as close to the edge of the sofa as the rope allows.

Besides him Max is doing a poor job of hiding a smile of his own at her expense. She reaches her hand back out, feels along the animal's skull, rubs at the soft skin of his ears. Not so bad at all, really.

After a moment Bandit wriggles out from under her fingers, evidently having his fill of being pet, and whirls around to face Max, bowing low on his front legs. Max cages the dog in with his arms, body language loose and relaxed, and buffets him to and fro without any real force behind his movements- playing, she identifies after a moment. It reminds her of the way War Pups tussle, before they begin learning to fight for real, all laughter and showy movements. It raises a smile on her face, the first since waking up in this place.

“How long is 'a while'?” Furiosa says to Marty, recalling his words to the animal during his 'introduction', as well as her earlier questions. Was there any meaning to the passage of time, now that she is so far out of her rightful place in it, or should she still push to return as soon as possible?

He hesitates in answering, which draws her entire attention immediately, gaze leaving the roughhousing pair on the floor to take stock of his expression.

“Until you're healed,” he says, and it has the same flavor as the half-truths Max had used back at the hospital.

“What aren't you saying?” she asks, alert for signs of a trap. She trusts the Fool, he'd proven himself to her already, but this man was still an unknown entity.

He sighs, and hands the dog's leash to Max before taking a seat in one of the room's other chairs. “It's hard to say. The flux capacitor- the special engine that lets the car travel through time- was damaged. I'm working to repair it, but... it might never run again.”

The air rushes out of the room as the steel jaws of a trap snap shut around her.

“It's a miracle Max was able to get it here in one piece at all, considering the hits it took. She was never meant to stand up to the apocalypse.”

Furiosa hadn't contemplated that she might be stuck here entirely, unable to return at all.

When she had been stolen away from the Green Place, she always knew she only had to survive long enough to somehow make her way back to it. Losing it a second time was devastating but she'd been able to hold together because there was still some of her kin living, still some scraps of home to be found in their stories, in the hope the girls carried with them. But this is loss on a completely different scale. If she's truly stuck in the Before Times, then the only world she's ever known is as unreachable as if she has died after all. She can't even hope to live long enough to pass the days naturally- twenty thousand was the number Max had given, and that was already a lifetime.

The horrifying thought occurs to Furiosa that without her there, the women would be permanently left to defend their position as leaders of the Citadel. It was only because she was an authority the War Boys already knew that the plan had some reasonable chance of succeeding without immediate mutiny. The girls are strong-willed, she knows, and once they find their feet will be far better suited for the sort of leading that needs doing than she, but in the immediate aftermath the Boys will be restless and surely violent- they'll be looking to avenge Joe, to secure some power in the new hierarchy for themselves. And none of the women understand them and their ways, won't know how to work with them, what shows of power and ritual to use to gain their trust and respect... Nightmarish visions fill her mind's eye as she tries not to contemplate how terribly wrong it might go.

“Hey, hey,” Max says from besides her, voice gentle, hand moving to land lightly against her shoulder. Furiosa doesn't know whether to flinch from his touch or press forward to find comfort in it, thoughts temporarily whited out as the horror washes over her.

The others wouldn't have let her leave if they thought she might have recovered in their care, which means they must have agreed with Max that bringing her here was her only chance. If she had died rather than been displaced in time, she would be in the same situation- far from anything she knows, unable to help, unable to defend the women she'd sworn to protect. It doesn't help much, but she's learned through long and bitter experience that she can only work with what she has available.

Furiosa sucks in a deep breath, holds it against the throbbing ache in her chest, releases it slowly. She's survived worse, and there's life in her still. Surely with all the resources this place offers there's a way to fix this, to find a solution.

“You called it an engine,” Furiosa says, voice steady as she finds Marty's face again.

He smiles sadly and shakes his head, eyes kind. “Turn of phrase. It's all wires and circuits, nothing like the machinery you'd be used to.”

She nods; it makes sense that whatever mechanism allowed them to slip around time wouldn't be anything she was familiar with. She knows enough wiretech to repair the lines running from an engine's heat sensors and set kill switches, but she'd never needed to learn beyond that. Something from before the Fall was bound to be far more complex, especially something as unique as she assumes this device is.

“You know how to repair it?” Furiosa asks, less hopeful and more assessing.

“I'm doing my best,” Marty replies, “But it was designed by a far smarter man than I, and I can't guarantee that my patch jobs will work.”

It's as good an answer as she'll get, she expects. Weariness washes over her as the tension of the situation dissipates and she's stuck with her wheels spinning uselessly in place.

“I was hoping you wouldn't ask until I had a better answer,” he adds, “I am sorry.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ETA- I forgot to link it when I first posted, but there's a little bit of Marty's POV from when Furiosa gets out of the hospital [up on tumblr~](http://v8roadworrier.tumblr.com/post/138592679771/pov-something-thats-already-happened-retold)

They let her be for a while, half-dozing on the couch. Even injured and out-of-place, it's stifling not to have anything to do. Marty suggests she read before he disappears through the reinforced door down the hall, but Furiosa's never found much enjoyment in the written word. Living stories were one thing, but bound onto paper they become weak and fluttering, relics of a time long dead.

Max occupies himself with some form of busywork from a nearby chair, obviously intending to keep an eye on her but trying to be surreptitious about it. Working on the brace he wears around his knee, she realizes as the smell of oiled leather reaches her. Furiosa wonders idly if it was damaged at all when she caught him by it, reaches up to rub at where the shoulder piece of her prosthetic had dug in painfully but held just long enough.

She breathes in the familiar scent of leather and oil over the strange dog-and-chemical smell of the couch and lets her mind wander in the quiet, absorbing all that's happened now that she has the time.

Time is all she has now, really- even the clothes on her back aren't actually hers.

It seems unbelievable that she's somehow traveled through time, but she has as much proof as she thinks is possible. Which means her entire world, everything she's ever known, exists only in what has suddenly become the future. Twenty thousand days, Max had said. It's an entire lifetime away, far more days than she can expect to live through.

She could revisit the Green Place now, or rather some version of what it once was. Would she find any familiar faces living there? Her own mother would have been a mere child during the Fall, if she's accounting for the days right, but KT was older, and Janey, and Gale... Would they be strangers who fit into the soft world here, or would she recognize any part of them? Would they know her?

Furiosa thinks about it, about finding one of her Mothers as a young woman and having their eyes slide right off, unknowing. It would hurt more than seeing those few who had remained after the death of the Green Place, she thinks.

The sun dips low in the sky and casts the room in shadows, until Max finally flicks on the electric lamps.

“Dinner?” he asks, jerking his head towards the kitchen.

Furiosa nods in reply and untangles herself from the nest of blankets she's been relegated to before he can suggest preparing everything himself. She's both injured and a guest, true, but she's itching to do _something_ , no matter how small, rather than continue to let her thoughts circle uselessly.

She surveys the rows of cabinets and wonders where to begin. The kitchen at the Citadel wasn't a place she ever visited in more than passing, and at the Green Place there was hardly any sort of permanent structure. The closest she's seen was the beaten-down room of the Eldest Mothers, and those cupboards were mostly missing their doors and crammed with a mishmash of pans and crockery.

She pulls the door closest at hand open and reveals a neat stack of ceramic dishes, glowing clean and unchipped, the same they'd eaten off earlier in the day.

“Two- hn, three plates,” Max says with a lazy gesture before stooping to open a floor-level cabinet of his own. “Bowls too.” There's the clank of metal-on-metal before he selects a metal pot and a low-sided pan, shutting the door against the rest.

She takes them down, places them on the counter with a quiet click before she closes the door again. “Next door,” he tells her, straightening to add the pans to the counter.

The second cabinet opens to stacks and stacks of canned items, labels bright and fresh, none displaying the warning puffiness of botulism. There's so many, more than she anticipated, and the sight arrests her for a moment. The wealth of it is astounding- cans are too heavy for most bikes to bother with, so growing up the Mothers rarely traded for them, but she knows how prized they can be. Another reason to remember that she's in a time of abundance.

“Which one?” she asks, refusing to give into the urge to stay and examine them all.

“Red and white label,” Max says from besides her, and she finds the cluster of labels easily amid the explosion of colors. “Chicken noodle soup.”

Furiosa remembers a sickly flock of chickens pecking around the Green Place, before they stopped laying eggs and were culled, and soup is hardly an unfamiliar concept, but she has no idea what a 'noodle' is. Still, when she locates the right can she passes it over, shutting the door on the others without allowing herself to even run her fingers over the unblemished metal of them.

Max pulls open the strange humming metal cabinet next, and she can't help but step forward to see what it contains. A light blinks on as the door opens, illuminating the interior, and after a moment a wave of cold air hits her.

The inside is filled with plastic and paper containers decorated with cheery depictions of food and landscapes and unfamiliar words, and it takes her a moment to realize that this is how they keep their food fresh. The motor she can hear humming in the background must somehow work a cooling system, far more robust than any she's encountered before. Furiosa crowds in close, astounded by how much food she sees, until she bumps into Max's back and hurriedly steps back away.

It takes a moment to find the memory, but she remembers hearing about these after all. Not as impressive as satellites or computers or airplanes, but refrigerators were high up on the wish list of the Mothers. A way to keep food cold and fresh even in the wasteland heat would be of immeasurable worth, though it had always seemed a fanciful idea as she grew up.

“Ever had cheese?” Max asks after a moment of rummaging, holding out a paper-wrapped packet of what she assumes is the food in question.

Furiosa shakes her head; she's heard of it being served at some of Joe's extravagant feasts, but ordinarily dairy was reserved for the young Pups who needed it to grow into strong warriors, and whatever trade partners could afford it.

A strange expression passes over Max's face and he pauses in place before adding, “It's from cows. Not, ah, mothers.”

It hadn't occurred to her to wonder. She knows that humans aren't the only ones to produce milk, but it's strange to be reminded that there are animals here in enough abundance that they can be spared to make something like cheese for everyday use.

In another moment he emerges with a tall square loaf of bread, another smaller paper-wrapped block, and a pair of fresh red fruit. Tomatoes, she thinks, though she hasn't seen one in half a lifetime.

“Slice these?” he asks, handing over the fruit. There's a wooden block with knife handles sticking out close at hand and she takes one at random, pleased with the clean edge it has.

It's awkward to keep hold of the round fruit with only her bare stump and Furiosa wonders if there's scrap she can use to make herself some sort of arm. She spent nearly four hundred days without anything, after first losing her hand, and she can manage well enough without- but it certainly makes things easier to have the option.

The cooking surface turns out to have a clean-burning flame, nothing like the smoky plumes she's used to from coal-fire or lanterns. There's the faint smell of methane but it's quickly subsumed by the aroma of the heating soup, the sizzle of frying bread.

“How does the... refrigerator, is it? How does that work?” Furiosa asks while they watch the food cook, wanting to know the answer as much as wanting to fill the silence, uneasy with how little she knows about this place, this time.

Marty arrives sometime during Max's halting explanation, lured by the smell of food she would guess, and offers lavish praise for what amounts to a simple meal. It's meant in good humor, the sort of teasing that would be perfectly at home in the barracks among crew, and Furiosa abstains from joining in but listens with a faint pulse of contentment.

Noodles turn out to be another strange form of bread, soft and a little rubbery, but good mixed with the broth. The abundance and variety of food will take time to get used to, familiar as she is with the same hardtack biscuits and near-unidentifiable protein mashes day in and day out, but while it's available she intends to take advantage of it.

When the soup is gone she dips her fingers into the bowl and runs them around the sides, to get as much of the traces as she can. There had been so much tinned food in the cupboard, mountains more in the cold refrigerator, but some part of her is distrustful that the supply will last and either way it was an abhorrent thought to leave behind any, to be wasteful.

“Max,” Marty says, gently but firmly, a change enough from the previous flow of conversation that she pays attention. Max stills with his own fingers in his mouth, likewise cleaning his bowl. “You're not a dishwasher.”

It seems to be a nonsensical statement but something passes over Max's face and he looks ashamed, almost. His hand falls to the flimsy piece of paper she was told was for cleaning up with, makes no further move towards his bowl though Furiosa can see a thin scum of broth waiting in the bottom rim.

She recalls that Marty had cleaned the dishes from their earlier meal, wonders if giving up the last dregs of a meal was one of the prices of living in his house. It was too late for her to leave any now but Furiosa resolves to remember for next time, such a small fee for being allowed access to the wealth of food they own.

That the time-engine might remain broken and she stranded in this place forever is something she doesn't want to dwell on. There's more luxury here than Furiosa has ever dreamed of seeing, but that same softness sits ill at ease with her. The casual display of food stores, the water that flows freely from taps, the electricity humming through the lights- it's overwhelming, alien to everything she's ever known.

The thought that she might easily grow to prefer such excess, might leave the women and everyone else left at the Citadel to their fates in exchange for clean water at her fingertips, sends guilt squirming low in her gut. This was the life that the Triumvirate were trying to recreate, the vision they sought at the expense of all others. Would she become like them so easily, wooed by a few meals and a soft place to sleep?

Her thoughts soured despite her intentions, Furiosa turns from where Marty has begun spinning a story about the dog, something equally as alien as the rest. What point was there in keeping an animal that did no work, that caused- by the sound of it- a considerable amount of mischief?

“I'm tired,” she says, and it's not quite a lie. She is weak still from her injuries, but not so much that she couldn't stay and continue listening, if she had the heart for it.

Marty makes a halfhearted attempt at coaxing her to stay but Max only nods understandingly, lets her retreat towards the room she'd been given to sleep in without forcing any further explanation. After a few minutes there's quiet footsteps in the hallway, a soft knock at the door.

She opens it to see Max, back-lit by the hallway's lights. She hasn't bothered turning on the room's lamp, not seeing the point when there was enough murky light from outside to see by and she would soon be attempting to sleep, anyway.

“Should change your bandages,” he says, proffers a small white box that she assumes contains medical supplies.

Furiosa brings her hand up to feel one of the wounds on her chest by reflex, hisses out a breath when it's more tender than she expected it to be after a day of lying quiet. She peels up the bottom of her shirt to see if it's bled through the bandaging; it's an awkward angle and twisting to even see it clearly sends a deep throb of pain through her.

“I'll need help,” she admits reluctantly, the logistics of cleaning and re-bandaging a pair of wounds she can't even see more daunting than she has the energy for.

Max makes a wordless noise of assent and she gestures for him to step in from the doorway, clicks on the bedside lamp so there's enough light to see properly.

“This is your room, isn't it?” she asks as she sits, rucking the shirt up far enough that the worse of the two gashes is exposed.

He looks startled, eyes darting around the room as if never seeing it before, and then nods. It wasn't much of a guess- the house has two beds, and this room looked too lived-in for her to think that he was used to sharing with Marty.

“I'm sorry for displacing you,” Furiosa says, because she has a vague memory of him curled into the chair she can see in the corner while she slept in the bed proper.

He makes a quiet noise, nothing she can parse, and reaches out carefully to address the first set of bandages. His hands are gentle when they land on her side but she still flinches, a movement she quickly suppresses.

Max pauses, flicking his gaze up to meet hers, a question on his face. He saw her reacting at the hospital, must know she holds no love for healers, but it needs to be done. She nods, and hold herself perfectly still.

The tape comes unpeeled with a stinging tug and she risks the pain it'll cause to twist so she can look at it, sees that the ragged skin has been stitched shut with neat black thread, a detail she hadn't noticed at the hospital with so much else to focus on.

“The Organic preferred staples,” she says, surprising herself. Max breathes out, warm breath a startling contrast to the cool air of the room. He was in the Blood Shed for a while himself, she remembers, might have overseen some of the man's impromptu surgeries first hand.

He doesn't reply, just pours something that smells like alcohol out onto a square of gauze and dabs at the wound. The sting is bright and she sucks in a breath, lets the superficial hurt keep her grounded in the present. The Organic is- she's not sure where, actually. Not yet born in this time and dead, maybe, in her future. He's not here in the room, which is the important part.

A cool ointment goes on next, smoothed gently despite the rough skin of his fingers, then Max carefully aligns fresh gauze over the injury and tapes it down securely.

Furiosa turns so her left side is closer to the light, finds that she has to wrap her whole arm around to keep the shirt pinned out of the way, her nub not up to the task. Another reason to want an arm made, though she won't be able to belt it around her waist as she's used to, not until she's healed. This wound is the lesser of the two, the one Max paradoxically cut into her to save her, a neat line instead of a messy gash.

“I'm sorry,” Max says as he swipes his thumb gently below the injury, callouses dragging against her skin. It elicits a shiver for reasons that have nothing to do with pain, the touch far too light to be hurtful.

“You did it to save me,” she replies. She's not sure how exactly it happened- the memory is cloudy, and she never had the urge to learn the mechanics of healing- but she knows that when the knife slipped in, she was able to breathe again.

He cleans and rebandages this wound with the same dedication as he had the first, rests his hand on the freshly-placed gauze for a long moment, the heat of his skin warm through the layers.

“Will you stay?” Furiosa asks, letting her shirt fall back into place as he closes up the medical kit. “It's your room, after all.”

He looks up at her, still kneeling on the floor in front of the bed, and there's something raw and vulnerable in his expression that has her reaching down with her hand, twisting despite the sharp throb of pain it sends through her to lay her fingers lightly on the side of his face.

Max closes his eyes and leans into the touch, brings one of his hands up to lay over the top of hers and holds it in place.

“I'm here,” she says quietly, “I'm safe.”

He nods, stubble rough where it rasps against her skin, and lets out a shaky breath. It was a close call, Furiosa knows, but the depth of his reaction is almost unexpected, given that they had tried to kill one another when they first met only days before. How quickly battle forged bonds between them, that they now find comfort in seeing each other whole and unharmed.

It's easy to settle her Fool onto the mattress besides her, warm and safe under the nest of blankets even with space enough between them. She's used to sleeping surrounded by bodies, reliable members of her crew piled around for safety and for comfort, and returning to some form of that eases a bit of tension deep inside her.

Even with the exhaustion that comes from healing, the reassurance of a trusted weight besides her, Furiosa wakes readily when Max moves on the mattress more than just turning over. There's no noise but the rustle of blankets, nothing that makes her think there's danger though she grips her borrowed knife in anticipation anyway. He had been lying besides her, stretched out and staring at the ceiling, but she slits her eyes open when the noise stops and sees that he's instead moved to sit upright with his back to the headboard.

Just that, then. She's used enough to lying flat to sleep, having the luxury of a bed to return to after long days in the driver's seat and the knowledge that her door was barred against intruders, but the same couldn't be said of many road warriors.

Furiosa relaxes her hand around the hilt of the knife, lets her eyes fall shut again.


	5. Chapter 5

There's low gray light filling the room when more movement from Max rouses her from sleep again. Furiosa normally wakes quickly and easily, attuned to the threat of danger, but she is warm under a pile of blankets and more tired than she expected from healing, the pull of sleep strong in the quiet dim room.

“It's raining,” Max says, voice just above a whisper.

Half-asleep Furiosa scowls, petulantly curls her legs in a little closer and keeps her eyes closed. Rare though it may be rain means throwing tarps over the upper gardens, hauling in whatever salvage was waiting outside the caverns to be processed before it has the chance to rust, dealing with the inevitable stink of half-rotten Wretched when the weakest and least protected succumb, and she is aware enough of the dull but ready-to-turn-sharp ache in her chest to know that she is in no mood to get up and play Imperator at the moment.

“Mhm, sleep,” Max says, brushes one of his hands gently over the top of her head. She can feel him climb off the mattress entirely, leaving a warm empty hollow where his legs had been tucked under the blankets, and on a slow morning like this staying in bed feels like a marvelous idea. Ace can deal with the rain prep, Furiosa thinks muzzily, already slipping back to sleep.

  
  


A loud metallic crash wakes her not long after, jolting upright with her borrowed knife in hand, eyes blinking wide and alert. Not a gunshot, not quite an explosion or the tangle of rigs crashing... a rockslide, maybe? The sight of such an unfamiliar room around her paralyzes her for a moment before she remembers where she is, that she's staying at Max's house. Likely not a rockslide, then, if she's not in the Citadel.

Furiosa rolls out from under the blankets and gets to her feet, flicks her eyes to the still-curtained windows but sees no sign of fire from the outside. She opens the door to the hallway cautiously, aware that already wounded and with only a knife she needs to be more careful than she normally would be.

The house, as far as she can tell, is quiet. There's the low hum of the refrigerator's motor at the end of the hall, but nothing that suggests danger- the hallway doors are closed, there's no smoke in the air, no voices, no real sign of there being anything amiss. Furiosa pads down the hallway silently, ducks her head through the doorway to check the front room quickly only to find it empty and undisturbed, windows closed but uncovered, outside and garage doors shut.

There's rain pattering at the glass panes, the sky outside dark and gray, and she remembers suddenly that Max had told her it was raining when she was still mostly asleep. The noise might only have been thunder, then.

She ducks into the kitchen next and sees it looking as neat and clean as the day before, with the exception of the door to the outside being ajar. Furiosa thinks about checking the rest of the inside doors first, but she hasn't heard anything from behind them and has a feeling that had there been trouble, either she would have heard it or Max would have come back to alert her.

The door swings open to reveal a gray-hazed compound, the same patch of greenery she saw from the computer map, surrounded by a high but open-grated wire fence. There's a figure standing in the middle of it that she instantly recognizes as Max, head tilted back to the sky, uncaring that the toxic rain is falling directly on him.

“Max?” she calls out, confused by the seemingly needless risk he's taking- he wasn't moving tarps to cover the plants or any equipment there might have been in the yard, wasn't even wearing a jacket to keep the bite of water off but just the same thin shirt as earlier.

He turns at the noise, jerkily like he's startled, but then even with the distance and the obscuring water she thinks she can see him smile when he catches sight of her. Max waves a hand to gesture her over, loose and casual, not like there was any sort of threat to make him worried.

Furiosa declines with a shake of her head, stays in the dry threshold wondering what's gotten into him.

“It's clean,” he says, voice pitched just loud enough to carry over the clatter of the rain. “No bombs yet.”

For a moment she stands in mute incomprehension before abruptly remembering what she had been told and shown the day before, the explanation for how she came to be in such a well-preserved building. She's not just visiting someone's well-kept dwelling, she's completely displaced in time. She's in the past, the _past_ before the world itself had died- the rain used to be clean, she remembers the Mothers saying, used to be just water.

Max doesn't say anything else, just keeps his hand extended like he's offering it for her to take. He is mad, she is sure of that, but his madness doesn't run to standing out in the toxic rain willingly. Furiosa takes a cautious step away from the side of the house, lets the falling rain hit against her skin. It's cold, and the drops surprisingly heavy as they land, but there's no tingle of danger even when she brings it to her lips to taste. They'd been telling the truth- it's as clean as anything that ever came out of the Citadel's pipes.

Past the patch of rough concrete spilling from the doorway the ground is soaked, squishes under her bare feet in a way that reminds her of the lakeside at the Green Place, different for the coarse covering of green grass under her feet, their soft blades tickling at her skin.

There's clean water falling from the sky and Furiosa has never thought she would see anything like it, thought that her days of standing with the Wretched waiting for a water drop were the closest she would ever come to knowing this aspect of the Old World. It drums against her skin, the top of her head, runs into her eyes when she tilts her head back to look upwards.

A flash of lightning strikes out some unknowable distance away, brightens everything for an instant before leaving it seemingly darker than before, a low rumble of thunder following moments later.

Max is smiling when she reaches him, standing foolishly in the middle of the fenced area as if there was no danger from the buildings she can see built nearby- because there really isn't, somehow. Because people didn't use to kill one another without provocation, back Before.

Furiosa doesn't take his proffered hand, wants to keep hers free to catch the rain, to feel the way the water runs over her skin in rivulets. His clothes are soaked through and clinging to him like a second skin, water slicking down even the ridiculous tufts of unruly hair like he's been standing out here by himself for a long time already.

The whole thing is absurd, excessive, and something that wants to be a laugh bubbles up through her. There's so _much_ here, just falling from the sky and sprouting from the ground, and instead of being thankful these people living here now killed it. Max shares her smile, eyes soft to match the rolling gray sky above them.

“Why were you out there? To leave this...” Furiosa can't help but ask, even as it wipes away the easy expression from his face. She was taken from her Green Place and it had only a fraction of the resources on display here; she can't imagine what would have driven him to be out in the wastes if he had something like this waiting for him.

Max flicks his eyes around, licks his lips. “Couldn't stay,” he says, ducks his head and shrugs. “There's, hm, no place for me here.”

There certainly seems to be a place for him- a building he trusted enough to seek help from, a room filled with things, a person who took him in readily enough to accept her as well. Furiosa frowns to herself because it doesn't make sense for him to give it all up even when she thinks about how he's undeniably a wastelander, a sharp contrast to their soft alien surroundings.

Perhaps he truly was madder than she gave him credit for, she thinks with a shake of her head, folding her arms in close because the rain is turning cold.

From the building's doorway Marty's voice shouts out suddenly, in despair- “Bandit, no!”

Furiosa startles, hand flying to the hilt of the knife tucked in her waistband, and sees Max jump as well, caught off guard. Bandits? But no, there's the noise of a dog barking, a low-slung brown shape running from the direction of the doorway. It was only the dog's name, not an alarm.

The dog checks his headlong rush right before crashing into Max's legs, red tongue lolling out of his mouth and tail wagging.

“Get back here!” Marty calls, “Max, grab him!”

Max obediently reaches down to grab the dog's collar but Bandit dances out of reach, runs for the far corner of the fenced yard instead.

“I'll get him,” he says to her, blinks and then frowns, “You should go in.”

Furiosa raises an eyebrow, aware that the dull ache and constriction in her chest makes her less suitable for chasing after the animal at the moment, but the rain was clean, she thought, not a danger to be out in.

“Your chest. Lungs,” Max says, making some vague gesture that conveys nothing. She _was_ fairly well soaked through by now, Furiosa concedes, and she doesn't know what effect that will have on her wounds, certain that the bandages will need to be changed, at least.

She nods and leaves him to catch Bandit, slipping a little on the rain-slicked ground as she walks back to the house. The rain was lightening, anyway, seemed as if it was coming to an end.

“You shouldn't have been out there,” Marty says with a frown when she draws near, disapproving enough to catch her by surprise. “The last thing you need to do is catch pneumonia.”

He stands aside from the doorway to let her pass, making no move to step out himself. Furiosa hugs her arms into herself tighter and shivers against her will as her feet hit the tile floor, colder than the mud outside by far.

“Into the shower with you,” Marty says, fluttering a hand towards the hallway, “You'll catch your death of a cold if you don't get warmed up.”

Furiosa stays where she is in the kitchen, unsure what Marty means by 'into the shower', what it has to do with getting warm.

“The shower?” he repeats when she hasn't moved, “In the bathroom? I though you said you knew what it all was.”

She does, but she doesn't know what he's asking- the taps above the sink and the larger wash-tub were easy to figure out, and there had been a sign tacked up on the wall in the hospital explaining how the (shockingly wasteful) system worked that made it clear what _that_ basin was intended for, but she can't fathom what either of those has to do with being soaked from the rain. Unless it wasn't as clean as Max told her, and Marty wanted her to wash it away instead of only getting dry.

She would need to heat the water up if it was meant to be warm, though, and the only place she's seen fire so far has been the stove, which leaves her at a loss as to why she would be asked to leave the kitchen. She's capable of hauling a few buckets of water to the large wash-tub on her own, she is sure, even injured and without her second hand.

Marty sighs, and something about the tone of it has Furiosa tensing, feeling a flush of something like shame, the same hotness that had galled her when she first clawed her way up to the ranks of the War Boys and found herself surrounded by a culture that was utterly unfamiliar to her, even after learning what she could from the fringes of the Wretched. She doesn't understand what it is he's talking about but by his reaction she should, and the fact that she doesn't is very nearly humiliating.

The dog darts in through the open door before either has a chance to say anything further, immediately shakes himself vigorously to spatter mud all over the kitchen, occupants included. “Dammit, Bandit!” Marty grouses without any real heat, wiping mud from his face, “Now we all need baths.”

Max clicks the door shut behind him, drips water down onto the floor. He doesn't shiver though his feet are bare too, muddy up to the ankle; there's mud and flecks of grass smeared along one of his arms like he might have slipped and caught himself on it while corralling the dog.

“You had to leave the door open?” Marty directs his way, a hand fisted around the dog's collar to keep him from darting off and dragging mud further into the house.

Max makes some quiet noise, shrugs. It had been Furiosa who went out the door last and she should have secured it behind her, but the alien sight of the rain had made her careless, another point of failure to needle at her.

She thinks about saying so but Marty sighs again, dismissively this time, says, “Just- go get changed, both of you. We're not running a wet t-shirt contest here.”

It's another nonsensical phrase to her but Max flushes red, grunts indistinctly in reply before waving towards the hallway back to the other rooms, brushing past her to lead the way out of the kitchen.

At the hallway's storage room Max pauses to pull out a pair of towels, thick and plush and clean, hands one to her wordlessly. Furiosa's skin is cold enough from the rain to be almost numb and she shivers even as she dries herself, carefully wipes her feet clean of mud before stepping onto the carpet of the bedroom.

She doesn't want to reveal her ignorance to Max as well, but she hates the way not knowing makes her feel stupid, reminds her sharply how out-of-place she is. "What's the shower?" Furiosa asks when the door clicks shut, when there isn't Marty to overhear and make her feel judged.

Max pauses where he's pulling one of the cabinet drawers open, fabric crammed inside. "It's for washing," he says, "There's a water spigot up high, you stand under it. Rinse off."

It doesn't explain why it would be any warmer than standing in the rain, why it would make sense to get clean after being drenched in water outside, but it does explain the pipe she had seen sticking out of the wall above the large wash-tub, too high to be a practical way to fill it when there was a second tap lower down as well. Furiosa swallows down the desire to probe for more and nods in acceptance as Max resumes pawing through the drawer, taking out some cloth before shutting it and moving to another.

“These'll fit,” he says, and as he holds out a bundle of fabric she realizes that it's not rags and blankets that he's been picking through but actual clothes, that he has enough clothes in near-perfect condition to fill entire drawers. He's been wearing something different every day she's been here in the past, now that she thinks about it, and Marty as well. "We'll get you your own things soon," he says when she hesitates, as if it was the fact that she's borrowing someone else's clothing that bothers her.

"My own?" Furiosa echoes in surprise, testing the thought of it as she takes hold of the items he's offering now. It's just one more reminder of the wealth, the _decadence_ of the past. Before this she'd worn the same fabric for nearly six thousand days, stolen from the Vault she was thrown out of, and now she was faced with so many pieces of clothing that she could wear something different every day for an entire moon cycle, if she wanted, and he was offering to get yet more.

"Mhm," Max hums, "You can, ah, pick out what you want. When you're better we'll go shopping."

The excess of it makes her want to laugh, almost, but instead she only nods, too tired suddenly despite having only recently woken up to address it further.

He turns his back on her to watch the windows, stripping off his soaked shirt as he goes, and the sight of the dark mess of his blood-bag tattoo catches her breath for a moment, a reminder that he'd been part of the Citadel's machinery despite his ease with this current setting. Furiosa turns away to keep an eye on the door as she sheds her own clothes quickly, re-covers herself with fresh dry fabric that smells vaguely of chemicals, of wood. The shirt has sleeves long enough that she irritably pushes the hem of it up past the elbow of her half arm, fabric bunching and sliding until she rolls it up into itself, too loose on her when it was meant for Max's bulkier frame.

She peels the soaked bandages off her skin while Max bundles the discarded wet clothes away, surprised the tape held at all let alone strongly enough to pull at her skin as it comes undone. She doesn't have the energy to deal with re-bandaging them and remembers being told that wounds should be left uncovered sometimes to get air, anyway.

There's the sound of water running through pipes when they step back into the hallway, the bathroom door shut. Behind the wood of it she can hear Marty's voice, like he's talking to someone- the dog, Furiosa realizes, eyes catching on a smudge of muddy paw-prints on the floor leading into the doorway.

There's some type of tea and bread for breakfast, smeared with something dark and thick and fermented, and then Furiosa finds herself installed back on the couch with a blanket laid over her, the same as the day before.

Max, rather than taking up a seat for himself, crouches by one of the shelving units near the empty black wiretech display that drips cords. He grabs what looks like a wordburger off it and she thinks maybe she can persuade him to read aloud, since it seems as if there's nothing else to pass the time with when she's so weak and he's apparently determined to play nursemaid, but it opens with a plastic _click_ to reveal not pages but a flat shiny disk instead.

“You, uh, you know about shows?” he asks, turning to look at her, “television?”

She's never seen any, of course, but the Mothers had passed around plenty of stories about them, retelling favorite scenes or arguing about which show was better, bemoaning plots that were left unfinished when the power cut out for good. Everyone had their own, it seemed, just as with wordburgers.

“That's what that is?” Furiosa replies, flicks her eyes from the case in his hand to the dormant wiretech display. She can remember some of the titles the Mothers had used when talking about them, thinks with a rush that she could watch some of them for herself, now, and isn't sure if she wants to replace the memory of their voices drawling out storylines with the show itself.

Max hums, nodding, the offer implicit as he holds the disk and stays crouched by the wiretech she now assumes must be the television.

“What one is it?” she asks, half hoping it's one she's familiar with and half hoping it's something new instead.

“The Good, Bad, and Ugly,” Max replies, and it's not any of the titles she knows; she waits to feel disappointment finds only a loosening of the nervous anticipation. “It's a, hm... it's about the past. Wasn't so different.”

Further past than she is now, Furiosa assumes he means. She doesn't know much about history other than some of what the Eldest Mothers had lived through, has never felt the need to learn about people who died long before she was born when it wouldn't do anything to help her survive a day longer. Max was waiting for a response, she realizes, and shrugs a shoulder in acceptance.

He nods, then turns back to fiddle with the wiretech boxes, the display lighting up in brilliant colors like the computer had, flashing through patterns and blocks of text that make little sense to her. It sinks into a moving drawing of what she thinks is a horse and rider, unusual music playing through speakers she can't see, and Max leaves the wiretech with a satisfied little noise to take a seat at the other end of the sofa where she's curled her feet up to make space.

Words and names flash by, still photographs appearing before being covered by something else, a repeating noise that she thinks is meant to be a gunshot, though it's badly muted. It's not a promising start, a far cry from what she had imagined- something like watching people act out plays, perhaps, or the way a skilled storyteller could draw images right in her mind's eye.

The red-tinged photographs finally give way abruptly to a completely different image, a view of some more naturally-colored landscape and what she realizes is a man on a horse, moving closer. It's fascinating to watch, being able to see him move as if it was happening through a window but knowing that it's not really there, that it's been recorded down on a disk to be shown on a whim.

There's very little noise, now that the music has ceased, and the image changes abruptly in ways she's not expecting, shows her completely different bits of the scene. It's at once strangely familiar, watching these people interact, and incredibly foreign at the same time with no narrator telling the story, with the view constantly changing to show one person and then the other. She has to watch and listen to know what's going on, like stumbling across strangers interacting who haven't yet noticed she's there.

The gunshots, muted and expected by the way the men were behaving, don't startle her when they come- but the noise that starts up at the same time does, a loud and high-pitched pulsation that overlays the scene, harsh against the inside of her skull. It drags on for a long minute as the display shows her the aftermath of the gunshots, makes something squirm uneasily insider her gut.

“Not one of your cowboy movies again,” Marty's voice says from the entrance to the hallway when the sound has faded away, unexpected enough to have Furiosa flinch, twisting in her seat to catch sight of him despite the way it pulls at the stitched-closed wounds.

Max makes some wordless noise and shrugs, eyes tracking across the room reflexively before settling back on the television, apparently unconcerned with the mild censure. Bandit pads over from the hallway, fur clean of mud and dried, snuffles his nose at Furiosa before abruptly jumping up into Max's lap.

He doesn't react much to the animal, doesn't startle or flinch at the contact, only lets out a puff of air when the weight lands and then rubs over Bandit's head as the dog wiggles around, looking for a comfortable place to rest. He ends up spilling off Max's legs and onto Furiosa's feet when he settles, warm and heavy through the fabric of the blanket.

She hears Marty move away to the kitchen on the other side of the wall, a chair's legs scraping against tile. The show plays on and she focuses her attention back to it, getting the hang of the way the view-point changes and the scenes transition into one another the longer she watches.

At some point the distraction of _how_ she's watching fades away and the story itself takes over, telling itself not through a blatant narration but with the images it's showing, the words the characters are saying. It's captivating, enthralling in a way she hadn't predicted even knowing how dearly the Mothers had missed it.

There's some things that don't make sense- were the characters meant to be hearing the same rattle of music as she was? why would a weapons dealer be unprepared for thieves? were there really places that readily took in any ill and inured?- but even with a complete lack of cars the surroundings are more familiar than the clean house she's in now, the clash of gangs and personal conflicts one she understands easily.

Watching it stretches out for hours, more time than she think she's ever spent on a story that wasn't written in a wordburger, but it cuts to black after the tense threads of the story have been resolved and Furiosa finds that she doesn't miss the time spent.

“Good?” Max asks, a smile on his face like he already knows what her answer will be.

“I see why people miss it,” she says, still feeling a shred of second-hand tenseness running through her nerves, waiting for the guns to fire, for the rope to tighten. It was alive in a way wordburgers weren't, like watching a real confrontation unfold before her.

Max's smile twitches a little deeper, “Wanna watch another?”

She nods, but thinks for a moment and says, “This was the past?”

He blinks, “But not. Not really.”

“I meant,” Furiosa says, because she knows that they're actors playing parts, that none of them had really died while making it and that the story was either wildly embellished or made up entirely, “Do you have any about now.”

“Oh,” Max says, bobs his head. “Yeah. Modern.” He carefully displaces the dog as he stands up to walk to the television again, Bandit huffing and circling in place so his head is facing Furiosa instead, settling down entirely across her legs. It should be alarming to have his weight on her, but his eyes are soft and brown and dumb, contented and lacking anything human. She pets over the top of his head tentatively, the fur warm and living, and he yawns and closes his eyes as if he's going to sleep.

There's something triumphant in Max's expression as he holds up the next disk. “The Fast and Furious,” he says, and it must be the title of the show but the way he says it, like he wants it to be a tease about her name, has her giving a snort of amusement.

“It's about cars,” he says, “Racing.” And that's certainly a subject she's willing to watch, even as strangely mesmerizing as it had been to watch people ride horses and railways so casually in the last show. Furiosa gives him the go-ahead and he sets the wiretech up to play again before reclaiming his seat on the couch, sinking in slightly deeper than before, hand moving to pet Bandit's fur again even though it means stretching into her space a little.

This show is faster and louder right from the start, the people and the world they inhabit far stranger- more like what glimpses she saw of the crowds at the hospital than anything she's familiar with. The cars are good though, flashy in a way that would never survive the wasteland but fast and slick, exciting to watch. She feels almost as if she should be taking notes even while thinking that surely no one would actually act as these characters are, wouldn't really say and do such things.

There's another made to follow the first, she learns, and somehow the entire day is spent watching these shows, until the sky is dark and Furiosa doesn't even mind that she hasn't much moved beyond breaks to stretch, caught up in the stories the television is displaying.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Oops. Not abandoned I promise, just got distracted by other things and sorta lost my inspiration for a bit.

The next day passes remarkably similarly, and the one after that. It seems to Furiosa as if there are an endless variety of shows to watch, some so indescribable they leave her mind reeling, the settings and characters completely unreal. Beyond the shows there's medicine at regular intervals, and shared meals, and a pile of blankets to curl under at the end of the day, Max's regular breathing a point of focus as she closes her eyes and tries not to wonder if this is all that's left to her.

The third day of shows- the eighth day since she woke up at the hospital, and she wonders how long she stayed in that room, unaware- she realizes that she can take breaths near as deep as she used to before the injury without feeling like she's being stabbed all over again. She'd probably be fit for duty, if there was any job left for her.

For a long minute after breakfast Furiosa contemplates sinking back into the couch for another day of watching stories on the television, but even the though of such continued inactivity chafes at her. There's a garage through one of the doors, cars and tools, and she wasn't a dedicated blackthumb but she knows engines like she knows breathing, is sure there must be something to tinker with.

“What model car was that in the garage?” she asks Max, hovering between the sofa and the door to the garage, making a silent request.

“Toyota,” he says, and then, “You'll need shoes.”

Furiosa doesn't try and contain her smile of relief at not being shut out of the work space. There's a small tangle of shoes by the door and she looks to see which will give her the least amount of blisters from the poor fit while he stomps his own feet into a pair. She misses her own boots with a sudden fierceness, the leather cut and shaped to actually fit and further molded by a few thousand days of wearing, fastenings made to be easy to do up one-handed.

“What happened to my clothes?” she asks, slipping her feet into a pair and not bothering to do more than twist the hanging laces together and tuck them to the insides. The soles are thick rubber but the rest is fabric, flimsy and already worn down.

“They, um,” Max says, and at his hesitance she looks over at him. “They got burned. I think.”

“Burned?” There certainly hadn't been fire involved in her injuries and she's fairly certain the hospital hadn't had any signs of fire either, which means they were destroyed on purpose.

“They were contaminated,” he says, “I wanted to save them but. The hospital took them for disposal.”

Furiosa lets out a frustrated sigh. She truly has nothing here but her own self, and she's built herself up from nothing before but it takes such a long time.

“We'll get you your own things soon,” Max says.

She bites back the urge to say that she doesn't want them to _give_ her things, that she wants to work for them herself, but she's in a house with two mostly-unfamiliar men and she wants to think better of them, but she knows what sort of payment men tend to expect. It's already a surprise that neither has said anything about the debt she racked up in the hospital.

Instead she just nods her head towards the garage door again. “And what's the other car?”

“Ford Falcon,” he says, “But mostly on the surface.”

As if any car is actually the base model all the way through. Furiosa follows him into the garage, breathing gratefully the smell of guzz and oil and metal. The sleek black car looks slightly less incongruous to her now that she's had a few days of being surrounded by Old-World tech, but it's still something of a surprise to see how plain it is, how undefended. Now that she's looking she sees the logo stamped into the front grill, though she's unused to seeing the badges actually attached to the cars they came from.

The other, the Ford, is at least familiar in the rust that creeps up the edges, the flair of supercharger and exhaust pipes, the patched-up tires.

“It's only a V6,” Max tells her, and opens up the bonnet of the Toyota for her to take a look. The machinery fairly gleams with evidence of good care. “Can't mod it much, but,” he shrugs, “it's good for tinkering.”

It looks as if there's no basic maintenance that could possibly need to be done to it, though her mind quickly catalogues places that could be tweaked to get more power, more efficiency even from just this surface view.

“Falcon's half-and-half,” he says, and steps over to it. “Up front's normal-” Max heaves up the hood with a grinding noise, and she sees an engine block far closer to what she would expect from a scav's car, all improvised replacements and toeing-the-line-of-suicidal mods. He waves a hand for her to follow him to the back rather than letting her stick around to investigate it in any detail, though.

Furiosa goes easily, curious about what he wants to show her. He ducks under the rear bumper for a second and then bobs back up, and she wonders if he hasn't rigged his car to a switch system of some sort as well. One of what she would have assumed were gas tanks pulls easily up from the car's body as if on a hinge, far too easily for if it was actually filled with anything or secured as well as it should have been.

“This's the special part,” he says, and in the space the tank was covering she sees... a nest of wires.

It doesn't look like anything she's seen before, aside from the tangled bundles the wire-rats take in as salvage, certainly doesn't look like anything to have earned the almost-eager look on Max's face.

“What is it?” she asks, trying not to sound judgmental.

“The flux capacitor,” he says, and when that only earns him a blank look, “The time engine. What brought you here.”

A small “Oh” falls from her lips and she leans in closer to look at it, suddenly interested.

“Well,” Max says, “the capacitor isn't actually here. Marty's got it.”

It's still strange and impressive enough that she wants to examine it, as if she can make out anything from the colored twists of wires. He lets her carefully poke her fingers through it, prodding at inactive colored light-bulbs and tracing a conduit pipe up to a small tank that she assumes is meant to hold fuel for it.

“What does it run on?” Furiosa asks.

“Plutonium,” he says, and she recoils instantly.

“It's hot?” she asks, straightening back up from inspecting the device.

Max shakes his head, “Everything's in lead. Contained.”

She isn't entirely sure she believes him. Radioactivity is hard to keep in, and though she's heard that people in the past used to use it for all sorts of things she can only think of latent bombshells waiting to be nudged into going off, of cities that no one dares go into for fear of their bones melting and flesh bubbling up with tumors, of rain that kills everything slowly.

Furiosa isn't sure she likes the idea of being so close to something radioactive, but she reasons that Max has enough survival instinct that he wouldn't bed down somewhere dangerous, and that he and Marty both look like full-lifes to her, not like someone living in a hot area.

“Max?” Marty's voice calls out through the open garage door, and the both of them turn to look at him. “Bandit could use a walk.”

The dog in question bounds through the doorway and bows low on his legs in front of Max, tail wagging hard enough to _thwap_ against the side of the car.

Max hums, a note of reluctance in his voice, but he bends down to pet Bandit.

“And remember to keep the Camry street-legal, hmm?”

Max gives a theatrical-sounding grumble of protest at that and Furiosa thinks that it's yet another phrase she doesn't know, though she tries to keep the ignorance off her face.

Marty disappears from the doorway and Max turns to her, his gaze assessing as it flicks over her.

“Up for a walk?” he asks.

Physically she feels well enough to handle the strain but the thought of going outside where it's so alien, the spaces wide open except for the looming buildings, is equal parts daunting and intriguing. She looks down at the dog who's moved on to sniffing random items in the garage, tail still waving back and forth excitedly. It's not in her nature to turn down a challenge, even as off-balance she's been made by this strange new world she was thrust into.

“Of course,” Furiosa says in answer.

They retrieve a leash for the dog and leave through the front door rather than the garage. Bandit seems delighted to be out, pulling at the leash in Max's hand as he sniffs everything.

Furiosa walks slowly, unsure if the leisurely pace is for her benefit or not. Besides the roadway there's a strip of lighter cement, bordered on both sides by grass and other plants. It's wide-open, indefensible, and she feels the knife at her hip that's her only weapon keenly.

There are very few people walking by, and those that are don't carry the tenseness that she's used to, even when cars rumble by slowly enough to get off shots with perfect aim. Some simply walk by but a few others stop them to fawn over Bandit, who laps up the attention eagerly.

She's glad to see that Max keeps scanning the area as well, that he isn't lowering his defenses the way he has been inside the house. She's pretty sure there's a pistol tucked into the inside of the jacket he's wearing and knowing that also helps.

Her lungs start aching, and then burning, before very long. The air is colder than she thinks it rightly should be for daytime, and despite the medicine she's had access to helping her heal she hasn't ever been stabbed in the chest like this before. She tries to keep her breathing steady and hide the strain, but Max catches on fairly quickly.

“We should head back,” he says, pausing at an intersection of pale walking path and dark private roadturf, shaded by a tree with healthy green leaves.

“I'm fine,” Furiosa says.

“Mhm,” he hums, “Bandit's got all the walking he needs, though.”

She glances down at the dog which is sniffing at a tuft of grass on the edge of the leash's range, seemingly perfectly happy to keep going, and then back over at Max, unimpressed with his excuse.

Still, when he tugs on Bandit's leash and starts taking a few steps back towards the way they came she follows, hating the way their already leisurely pace has to slow further because of her. Hating a little bit that it _can_ slow, if she's being honest, that she's in a place where being slow and indulgent and soft isn't even anything worth commenting on. Furiosa wraps her arms around herself and focuses on finding a rhythm of breathing she can tolerate, jumping in place when a hand unexpectedly lands against her back.

“Y'okay?” Max asks, voice pitched low as if there's anyone around to hear.

“Fine,” she says automatically, but when he pauses to let Bandit sniff at the base of one of the slender growing trees that dot the area, she lets herself lean in against him just a little before they start back up walking.

She spends the rest of the day on the couch, tired out from the walk and from the unfamiliarity of her surroundings and bitterly resenting both.

  
  


Two days later she's on the sofa with a wordburger she's barely pretending to read spread over her legs when Marty comes up out of the reinforced door- his personal workshop, she's ascertained- in a cloud of foul smoke.

Max looks up at him expectantly.

“Still broken,” Marty says, and she sinks a little deeper into the cushions, disappointed but unsurprised. “You're gonna want to get dressed though, we're getting your new papers done up.”

“What's wrong with the old ones?” Max asks, a hint of a pout on his face.

Marty looks at him and raises an eyebrow. “No one's gonna believe you're only twenty-five anymore, kid.”

Twenty-five _what_ , Furiosa wants to ask, taking note of the endearment as well.

He turns to her next. “I know it's rude to ask a lady her age, but... any idea how old you are?”

She frowns a little, unsure why he wants to know but trying to add up the days anyway. She can't remember how old she was when she was taken, the memory of which milestones she passed left blurry, and her count of days that had passed at the Citadel is inexact, full of holes. “Twelve, maybe thirteen thousand days?”

Marty closes his eyes for a second, and then pulls out something from his pocket. It looks like the same communication device Max had used in the hospital room, the front half lighting up with colors. He moves his fingers over it a few times and then says, “So about thirty.”

“Thirty what?” Furiosa asks before she can think better of it, wondering what unit he's using to calculate age. It's far too small a number to be by moon cycles.

“Years,” Marty says. “It's how we measure time around here. Three-hundred-sixty-five days to a year.”

She blinks, and wonders who came up with _that_ number. It's also a huge chunk of time- she feels as if she's taunting fate by counting in months, and they're lumping hundreds of days together?

“It's how long the Earth spins 'round the sun,” Max says, twirling his hands in demonstration.

The description sparks off a memory, and Furiosa realizes that she's been told about years before, remembers the Mothers celebrating the solstices of one long and one short day, something that happens every year. She refuses to let herself look as if she's affected by this show of ignorance, but she thinks she can feel a bit of heat creep along the tips of her ears anyway.

She also wants to know what papers he's talking about, why he needs her age, but she hates the feeling of asking for explanations for things that should be apparent.

Marty glances at her, then says, “I think it's better if we don't give you a driver's license.”

She bristles. “I've been a driver since I could walk,” she says immediately. She fought tooth and nail for the right to drive at the Citadel and she isn't about to give it up now, especially in this place where it apparently isn't even dangerous to be on the road.

“Not on these roads,” Marty says with a shake of his head. “If you're staying we can talk about teaching you the laws, but for now...”

If she's _staying_. The sour-tinged smoke from his workroom lingers, a tangible reminder of the fact that she's stuck here in this strange place where nothing is as she's used to. Furiosa backs down from the argument, gut twisting.

Max clears his throat. “Why aren't you just sending pictures...?”

“Fingerprints and such,” Marty replies. “She's getting the whole fake identity package.”

This apparently satisfies Max, and he nods. Furiosa isn't entirely sure what's happening at all, but Max tells her that they're leaving the house and she should wash up, get into clean clothes.

She continues to be amazed by how much water people in this time waste, how they consider clothing that's been worn a handful of days, and then only indoors without much activity, to be dirty enough to warrant washing. Water comes out of the tap hot when she turns the knob the right way and she wipes herself down, glancing at the large wash-tub and the high spigot Max had told her was the shower. The thought of having water that's warm like this pour over her is still strange enough that she can't quite bring herself to contemplate actually _using_ it.

She slides on new variations of Max's clothes, this time not the soft shapeless pants she's worn before but stiffer denim, with pockets deep enough to hide her knife in. She has to borrow a belt as well, the waistband too large to stay up on its own unlike the other pants with their built-in drawstrings. It reminds her a little of running around as a War Boy in the requisite ill-fitting pants, before she found leather to make trousers that were even sturdier and actually stayed up on their own.

This time Furiosa is alert enough to pay attention to her surroundings as Marty drives them in his sleek cushy car away from the house. They travel the same path she's walked with Max and Bandit a few times by now, but instead of turning back at the tree they have yet to go beyond Marty keeps driving. The houses slowly get closer and closer to one another, the cars more numerous.

A second lane forms and she can look out the window and right into another car, catching the gazes of their occupants more often than not. None of them show any signs of attacking despite the proximity, none even jostling for position at the intersections where Marty and the other cars slow to a halt but staying within the lines painted on the road.

“It's the lights,” Max says, and she turns to him, not having expected him to speak. He points up through the windshield, to where she can see a box on a wire strung across the road, fitted with three colors- lit up red, currently, but there are circles of yellow and green as well. “They direct the traffic.”

It wasn't a question that had been in the forefront of her mind, but she appreciates the knowledge all the same. “So red is stop,” Furiosa surmises.

He hums. The light flickers down to green and their line of cars starts moving again. It's a clever system, and she idly wonders if it might help the pile-up that usually occurs when the War Boys are called out en masse, before remembering that she might never see the Citadel again, and if she does then the majority of their fighting force is still on the wrong side of the mountains and unaware that she's killed their god.

“What's yellow, then?” she asks.

“Slow down,” Max says, but then his mouth ticks up into a smile. “Or speed up, to beat the red.”

“Don't teach her bad habits right out of the gate,” Marty says from the driver's seat, a sort of playful exasperation in his voice.

Max only smiles a little more, unrepentant and looking at her like they're teaming up against Marty together, and that more than anything is what has her smiling faintly as well.

The city grows around them, houses giving way to larger buildings with names and advertisements- shops, only far more permanent and seemingly specialized than the stalls she's used to in trade outposts. The car pulls into an expanse of pavement full of parked cars, a single huge and brightly-lit building at the end a surprising distance away from the road.

Marty gets out and she and Max follow his lead, though she's very aware of the dangers that might be lurking in the paradoxically open-yet-cluttered landscape around them, and wondering how safe it is to leave the car without a guard.

There's a huge white van parked next to them and as they walk around behind it the back doors swing open. Furiosa grabs the hilt of the knife in her pocket reflexively but Max barely flinches, and Marty walks right up with a smile.

“Where's Beedy?” he asks, looking around the van.

Furiosa steps to a better angle and sees that the van is stuffed full of wiretech, display boxes and things she can't name dripping from the walls and flashing little lights merrily.

“He's out sick,” the woman who'd apparently opened the doors says, her tone bored. She jerks her chin in Furiosa's direction, but addresses Marty. “This the one?”

“Yup. Full work-up.”

She scans her eyes over Furiosa, then shakes her head. “I never want to know, but I _really_ don't want to know this time,” she says. She beckons Max over. “You first.”

Furiosa is glad to let him step up, completely at a loss for what's going on. Something about her identity, but she has no idea what that has to do with wiretech inside of a van.

Max kneels down on the floor of the van, right in front of one of the only patches of wall that isn't covered in equipment. The woman likewise kneels right in front of him and pulls out a small box which she put up to her face, aiming at him like she's looking through a scope. It doesn't look like a weapon, and Furiosa can't imagine Max would so willingly put himself in harm's way, but she still tenses.

“Say 'cheese',” the woman says, an instruction he ignores in favor of relaxing his expression ever so slightly. There's a _click_ and a bright flash of light from the device in her hand, then another, but no one reacts except for Max blinking the spots away. “You're good. Next!”

Max gets up off the floor of the van, and the woman motions for her to come over. “It's a camera,” he says quietly as he passes her, “Harmless.”

Furiosa can see for herself that it's mostly harmless, and she trusts that Max wouldn't endanger either of them, but the confirmation is still reassuring. She even knows what cameras are, though she's never seen one before- they're what make photographs, exact copies of whatever is in front of their lens.

She kneels in the same place as Max and lets the woman _click_ the camera at her, utterly blinded by the bright flashes for a moment and left blinking dark spots out of her vision after.

“Lovely,” the woman says with flat sarcasm, “The scowl's a nice touch. Now get your- well, just the one I guess- get your hand over to this scanner.”

Furiosa gets off her knees and follows the woman's directions, pressing each finger into a little wiretech device. One of the displays on the wall of the van shows the images she's apparently creating, a series of lines in swirling patterns that match those on the pads of her fingers.

“We'll just flip 'em over for your left set,” the woman says with a shrug, “Probably they were the same anyway.”

She can't remember ever paying attention to the lines on her fingers, much less in enough detail to know if the swirls on her former left hand matched her right.

“This is going to take a while,” Marty says when she's dismissed and is stepping back down from the edge of the van.

“Two, maybe three hours,” the woman confirms.

Marty nods at her corroboration. “Max, why don't you go ahead and take Furiosa shopping?”

Max looks at the woman in the van, sitting at a chair in front of one of the flashing displays but watching them with a raised eyebrow, then to her, then back at Marty. He nods.

Furiosa wants to say that she's perfectly fine not having her own clothes, but she's wary of saying anything in front of a stranger that might draw attention to how she doesn't fit into this time, and she doesn't actually know if Max does perhaps object to sharing.

“Here, better use mine,” Marty says, and digs into a pocket until he pulls out a leather wallet, and extracts from it a flat piece of rectangular plastic.

She wonders if it's some sort of token like Gastown uses, but doesn't get a good look before Max tucks it away.

He nods his head towards the building at the far end of the paved area, indicates she should start walking besides him. “You ever been to Bartertown?”

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's just all pretend that it hasn't taken nearly a year for this to get updated, alright? Alright.

"What was all that?" Furiosa asks when they're out of earshot of the van. She wonders suddenly if she'll be able to see the photograph that was taken of her, whether it'll be any different from the flashes she's used to seeing in mirrors.

"Identification," Max says, "Mm, paperwork. They're making it look like you were born here."

She has no idea what that means, why anyone would care or how they would know. They hadn't done anything to her, hadn't given her a new brand or tat that would mark her- she hasn't noticed any sort of common mark or tag on anyone she's passed, either. Marty had said something about licenses for driving before they left and she wonders if people in this time need something like that just to be allowed to live here.

The store is actually quite a bit like the bustle and clutter and noise of Bartertown when she enters through wide glass doors that slide open by themselves, with the difference that everything is so bright and clean. Furiosa had thought that the lights at the hospital were harsh but it's nothing compared to the lamps overhead now, practically blinding even after the noonday sun. There's music playing from hidden speakers on top of the sound of people talking to one another and sharp beeping noises from the wiretech arranged near the doorway, a cacophony of noises.

For a moment she regrets walking inside, and as they stand just to the side of the entrance she debates whether to just turn around and walk back out.

"I don't need my own clothes," she tells Max now that it's the two of them. The people around them are pointedly not paying them any attention, which unsettles her more than if they were trying to be stealthy about eavesdropping.

He hums, and shrugs a shoulder. "They'd fit you better."

She doesn't mind that she has to belt the pants, that his shirts are baggy around her.

"Shoes, at least?" Max says, and she glances down at the pair on her feet already, how they're loose enough to rub uncomfortably even from the short treks she's been taking.

It isn't that she wouldn't mind having a pair of shoes that fit, or clothes she doesn't have to borrow- but none of it will be _hers_ anyway, and she can't repay him for any of it. Sharing out clothing that he already has is one thing, but bartering for more on her behalf is entirely another.

"I can't pay you back," Furiosa says, hating that she needs to say it.

He frowns, and shakes his head. "You don't have to," he says, and then, "Not any of it."

She doesn't believe him, but she glances at his face and thinks that arguing now will do her no good. Ahead the store looms large and overstuffed, and with a breath that she's calculated to just push at the limits of what her lungs can comfortably hold, she starts walking into the fray.

Max is right besides her, comforting in his solidity.

There's not, as she first assumed, merely a vast collection of different types of clothes bunched up on racks and piled on tables, the usual spill of goods in a trader's tent taken to the next level. Instead there's the same pieces of clothes repeated over and over, identical in every way she can tell.

It's so incredibly excessive and it makes her head swim a little, overwhelmed. But Max seems to know where he's going and she follows his lead down pathways of gleaming tile.

Deep in the store under a hanging sign marked "FOOTWEAR" she encounters a few rows of shelving units stuffed full of boxes, single shoes resting on the top shelf. She assumes the boxes contain more shoes, probably identical versions of the ones on top if the racks and racks of identical clothes they passed are anything to go by.

"Look familiar?" Max says, and she turns to see what he means because honestly, no. The closest she's seen to this is the jumble of boots snatched off carcasses, tossed into a pile and left for any War Boy to pick over- and that's a far cry from these orderly rows of gleaming new shoes.

He points down at the ground though, and she sees a piece of metal that looks almost exactly like the accelerator pedal of the War Rig.

"Measures your feet," he tells her, "So you know your size."

She admits to having been curious about what the markings actually meant.

At his direction Furiosa toes one of her shoes off and stands on the piece of metal, cold under her skin. She can't see clearly what lines she's measuring at, but a moment later Max is squatting down by her feet, sliding the metal pieces together until it's snug from heel to toe.

"Your feet the same?" he asks, looking up at her.

She shrugs; she certainly hasn't noticed any major differences in size between them. "Close enough."

He nods and stands back up. "Look for nine 'n a half," he says, "But you'll want to try them on anyway."

Furiosa wonders if she should put her current shoe back on, or maybe take off the second as well since this section of the floor is carpeted and clean. Max offers no clues, already absently scanning the rows of shoes from where he stands. She decides to slip it back on, not wanting to walk around lopsided and unsure if going barefoot is even something that's acceptable in a place like this.

Almost none of the shoes are types she's familiar with once she starts actually looking at them as individuals. Plenty seem to be made of fabric and foam, the sort that's sure to dissolve under any sort of stress, and even more don't even have laces, or have impractical high heels she can't really imagine anyone walking in.

With a bit of searching she finds a boot that looks like it'll stand up to some abuse, trying not to think about how much use she can actually expect to get out of it in this world where everything is slow and easy. It's leather; a great deal many more were some sort of fabric lined with rubbery plastic, made to look like leather from a distance but thin and flaking up close. She can't quite understand why someone would make shoes from something so useless, but has to admit it's still more practical than the ones covered in glitter.

"The boxes have matching pairs?" Furiosa asks, setting the boot back down on the shelf after turning it over from every angle. They're done up with laces, a challenge to manage with just the one hand, but they're free of gaudy detail and sturdy.

Max hums and bends down to look at the stacks of boxes with her, shuffling one and then another aside before grabbing one. There's a big tag with "9½" printed on it and she remembers what he'd said about size, thinks it's clever to have a system for it like they do for car parts and wonders if all clothing is sorted like that.

There are low benches tucked at the ends of the aisle and she sits on one while swapping her borrowed shoes for the new boots, seeing if they'll fit well enough to bring up to barter.

Her foot slides around inside of the boot, the shoe far too large despite the fact that she'd supposedly measured her foot to the right size. Before she even bothers doing up the laces or putting on the other Furiosa takes it back off. "Much too big."

He frowns a tiny bit, confused, and takes the second boot out of the box to turn over in his hands. "Ah," Max says as if he's figured something out, "It's a men's boot."

It's her turn to frown at him. "Men's?"

"Meant for men," he says with a shrug. "The sizes are different."

"Feet are all the same," Furiosa points out. Sure, men usually have _bigger_ feet, but barring deformities a foot is pretty much a foot.

He shakes his head, "They divide 'em up. Different sizes, different types. Ladies' shoes are, um, smaller, prettier."

"I don't care about prettiness," she says. "Is there a pair in one of those boxes that will fit me?"

Max looks down at the shoe in his hand, tilts his head. "Maybe?"

They look through the stack again and finally come up with a pair that fit, snug on her feet without being too small. They're still not as well-fitted as her old boots, but the leather is stiff enough that she knows they'll need to be broken in anyway.

"Where's the shopkeeper?" she asks, looking around the shelving units for any sign of the person they'll need to pay.

He shakes his head and picks up the box, boots tucked back inside in their layer of flimsy paper. "Everything's done at once," he says. "You pay before you leave."

Furiosa supposes that makes sense- she's never seen a store so large that it has four walls, but if it's all owned by the same person there wouldn't be need to worry about things getting mixed up. But still- "I'm only getting boots," she says.

He tilts his eyebrows a little. "Socks? Underwear?"

She hasn't had socks since the pair she was wearing when she was taken, knit from scraps by the Mothers around their nightly campfires. She's similarly given up on anything resembling real underwear when hers eventually ripped beyond repair, only stuffs rags between herself and her leathers when she's bleeding.

Max is giving her the option to say no rather than just going ahead to get them for her without her input, and that's what makes her crumble.

"Alright," she says, and he brightens a little as if she isn't costing him resources.

Right next to the aisles of shoes are racks and racks of socks, some hanging in pairs and others bundled in multiples and wrapped in plastic, a vast array of colors and shapes. Only one or two look like the socks she's familiar, the knitting on most incredibly dense so they're more fabric than anything else.

There are numbers stuck onto little pieces of paper above each display peg, and if they're meant to be sizes they don't correlate at all with the ones for shoes. Furiosa reaches out and feels the material some of them are made of, wonders if she's supposed to try these one like she did the boots.

"These should fit," he says, and she turns to look at what he's referring to. Max is holding out one of the packaged bundles, the fabric inside bright white.

She scans the words on the package and frowns when she sees the count of how many there are. "I don't need six pairs," she tells him. Just one set is going to be expensive enough a luxury.

He shakes his head, and tucks the package under his arm with the box containing the boots. "It's good to have extra," he says, "Cheaper if you buy 'em together, too."

Furiosa looks around her, at the shelves overflowing with socks all bright and fresh and new, and feels a pang for how absurdly decadent this world is. There are rows of similar packages in the aisle, enough for them to not seem like a luxury item, and she trusts Max to not lead her astray. She nods her head in acceptance.

He leads the way out of the section and back onto the tiled walkway, eyebrows drawing down his forehead as he looks around the building, the various signs hanging down from the ceiling. He lets out a quiet "Aha" and changes course, walking with more purpose.

The sign over this section of the store reads "LINGERIE" and Max avoids looking at her eye when he turns around to face her and says, "I'll, um, get a cart. You grab..." He gestures vaguely with the hand holding onto the package of socks. "Grab whatever."

She looks over his shoulder and sees more racks of clothing, as well as a few mannequins decked out in scraps of bright underwear. To her eye it isn't anything particularly provocative or embarrassing, but he looks uncomfortable with the thought, and she mentally shrugs off his reaction. "Alright," she says.

His shoulders relax just a little, and then he's walking off down the shiny tile flooring to who knows where. To get a cart, he'd said, and she wonders if there's a rental fee, wonders if there's any danger to them splitting up like this.

Furiosa steps into the section and takes a closer look around, hoping there's more available than just the bright and impractical pieces on display. To her relief, many pieces seem to be sedate skin tones and neutrals, rather than flashy colors and patterns, and the closer she looks the more pieces she finds with plain fabrics instead of ridiculous lace and whatever-else the show pieces are made of.

On a rack there's rows of packages just like the socks came in, with rolls of multiple plain pairs of underwear inside, and she takes one down off the rack to look at more closely. Buying multiples of socks is a good deal according to Max, and so she's willing to bet the same holds true for underwear as well. She thinks she'd like having clean pairs to change into again anyway, if she has to have an indulgence in this strange new world.

The back of the package gives a chart of measurements to determine size, but the last time Furiosa was measured was thousands of days ago, back before she was a War Boy, and just the memory of being weighed up like a piece of meat makes her repress a shiver in the chilled air of the store. She picks a package at random, and surveys the rest of the section while waiting for Max to return.

The other half of this department is bras, and she's heard enough stories from the Mothers to be content leaving those for others to buy. Her breasts don't get in her way most of the time, and when she does feel the need to strap them down she can think of a dozen better ways to do it than with lace and frills and thin little straps- and the idea that she might want a bra to put her tits on display, like the mannequins clearly are doing, makes her snort an amused breath.

When it's been a few minutes and there's no sign of Max, Furiosa tucks the packet of underwear under her arm and steps around the corner, scanning the chaotic store for any sign of his presence. Splitting up suddenly seems like a poor idea.

To her relief, she finds him around the other corner, pushing a wire cart ahead of him and looking entirely unharmed, and some tension leaves her body. They're not in Bartertown, she reminds herself, where you have to be constantly on guard if you don't want to be taken for an easy target; they're in the past, where there's so much stuff there's hardly any sense fighting over it.

"Good?" Max asks when he draws level with her, the box of shoes and package of socks already in the bottom of the cart.

She nods in reply and adds the underwear to the basket. It's the most extravagant shopping trip she's ever been on for herself and still the purchases fill only a tiny portion of the available space.

"Maybe new pants?" he says, looking at her earnestly. "Or something to sleep in?"

Furiosa wonders suddenly if he's uncomfortable with her sharing his clothes. He's possessive of what's his, she gathered that much from watching him on the road, and maybe that extends to her wearing his clothes even in this time of plenty. "Okay," she says. "One shirt, one pair of pants." She's used to sleeping in the same outfit she lives in already, so not having something separate to wear doesn't bother her. Though she will miss the warm softness of the clothes she's borrowed from Max.

He looks pleasantly surprised, like he didn't think she'd really accept his offer. He nods, and starts pushing the cart away from the lingerie section, the wheels gliding smoothly on the tile flooring.

Now that the shock of how much _stuff_ there is inside the store has passed, Furiosa finds it relatively easy to assess pieces of clothes without getting overwhelmed by the fact that there are dozens of identical copies strung up all around it. By the time she's found a pair of trousers in a dark, sturdy canvas material that look as if they'll fit, she feels as if she has a good idea of how the store works.

By contrast Max looks more and more uneasy, hands flexing against the handle of the cart and eyes darting around, a slightly glazed look on his face. Not fear, or wariness of an attack, and she reevaluates her opinion of the bright lights and level of noise. It's not too bad for her now that she has her footing, but she thinks it's clearly overwhelming Max.

"We can leave," she offers quietly, moving to set the pants down in the cart.

He shakes his head with more force than necessary, and then seems to force himself to relax into a shrug. "It's fine."

Furiosa isn't sure that's entirely true, but she trusts him enough to know when to tap out. She just needs a shirt now anyway, and then the trip is complete.

There are far more varieties of shirts than there were of pants, a great deal of which are absurd in materials or cut, if not both. It's another reminder that people don't have to dress for survival, and she takes a moment to wonder what it would be like to choose to wear something bright and frilly just because she wants to.

She doesn't want to, though, and so the thought leaves her with an unsatisfactory image. There's a table with a sign proclaiming "Basics!" and she picks up one of the shirts, a plain cut of fabric in a pale blue. Any color at all is an indulgence when she's used to black and white everything, but there's so much of it here that it hardly seems noteworthy that she can pick up a piece of cloth the same color as the sky.

There's no reason not to choose blue over plain white or black, she decides once she's checked that it will fit well enough, and yet it still feels somehow illicit to take it back to the cart.

Max flicks his eyes up to her at the movement of fabric falling, and he hums a questioning note.

"Done," she replies. Done unless he takes it upon himself to argue for some other purchase, that is.

He nods and begins pushing the cart, heading back towards the same part of the store they entered without another word to try and get her to buy anything else. Furiosa is curious about how the transaction will be conducted, if there will be haggling and what currency will be used. There's a queue that passes through a narrow passageway where everyone seems to be congregating, though she realizes that they could just as easily leave through the large doors they'd arrived through.

She eyes the walls for sniper mounts- but they don't shoot people in the past, do they? So there must be some other way of stopping thieves, though she doesn't know what, and she doesn't ask Max and reveal her ignorance of what everyone else here is just taking for granted.

The line moves closer to what she assumes is a worker here, wielding some sort of gun-like wiretech device that emits a bright light beam and beeps when she sweeps it over the items people are purchasing. It seems entirely esoteric until Furiosa spots a display with lists of items appearing after each beep, and realizes that the device is somehow counting up the items. It's so much faster than listing them by hand, of course, and she aches again for this casual display of all that was lost after the end of the world.

Max takes their few things out of the cart and sets them on a moving conveyor belt, where they're soon gone over by the clerk with her wiretech.

"Your total is sixty seventy-three," the clerk says, which is a number that means nothing to Furiosa.

"We're not haggling?" she asks in an undertone. None of the other people before them in the line had, but not everyone does.

Max shakes his head with a little negatory noise, and from a wallet pulls out handful of pieces of brightly-colored paper. He counts them out and passes them over to the clerk, who has put their purchases into a bag of thin white plastic.

Furiosa says nothing else until the transaction is finished- Max gets a piece of paper in return, this one with a list of the items they'd bought, written out by wiretech right before their eyes- and they're on their way back out of the doors into the daylight.

"That was money," she says, glad to be out of the artificial chill of the store, real sunlight on her skin again and a tinge of exhaust in the air.

He hums. "Only currency that matters, here."

She remembers hearing about one universal type of note but she'd never really believed it; there are always people who refuse types of barter, no matter how valuable it might be to anyone else. It must be convenient to only have to carry around thin paper, though she wonders how it doesn't get destroyed, or blown away and lost.

The van is gone when they return to Marty's car, and Marty is sitting in the driver's seat, attention focused on a small wiretech screen in his lap. He looks up when Max knocks gently on the side of the car, and smiles at them.

"All set, kids?" he asks, before his gaze narrows. "Just one bag? I thought I said-"

Max cuts him off with a grunt, and Furiosa shifts her weight as Marty's eyes land on her.

Marty sighs. "Ah, well. There's time. Get in the car and I'll pass out IDs."

She follows Max into the backseat of the car again, plastic bag stowed between them.

"Here's yours," Marty says to Max, and twists in his seat to hand him a slim piece of what might be plastic. "And this is you," he says to her, holding out a second piece of plastic.

Furiosa takes it, surprised to see that there's the photograph of herself printed onto it, along with- "That's not my name."

Max leans over the space between them to see, and makes a quiet noise.

"Well, no," Marty says. "People don't really go around with names like 'Furiosa' nowadays, not if they want to _avoid_ attention."

Furiosa runs a finger over the printed words and supposes it doesn't matter. She doesn't really exist in this time, won't be born for thousands of days yet, so it's inconsequential that this piece of plastic doesn't have her real name attached.

"I'll keep hold of your birth certificate, and everything else is all set up online. You really should update your Facebook profile pic, you know; there's only so far scenic mountain views can get you." Marty keeps talking as he starts up the car and begins driving, words that make less and less sense the longer he goes on. He isn't expecting any response, she doesn't think, and so she just sits quietly and watches the other cars pass by as they drive sedately down the road.


End file.
